Fortune reports:
The Ochs-Sulzberger family recently put in a request to pull the majority of its assets from the bank.
Morgan Stanley had been the longtime custodian of the family’s assets, including its stake in the Times company – which, based on recent share prices, is worth close to $640 million.
Not a good signal to the market and shareholders.
UPDATE: Now is confirmed by the NYTC
The family that controls the The New York Times Company is withdrawing most of its assets from the custody of Morgan Stanley.
The decision by the Sulzberger family, which a spokeswoman for the Times Company confirmed, comes as the Times Company is fighting a proposal by a Morgan Stanley fund manager that would allow shareholders to vote on whether to end the company’s two-tier stock structure and make it more vulnerable to a takeover.
Such a vote would be symbolic because only the family trust can change the class structure.
“Custody of the majority of the assets of the Ochs-Sulzberger family are being moved from Morgan Stanley to another institution,” a Times spokeswoman said Friday in an e-mail.
he Ochs-Sulzbergers hold about 20 percent of the Times’s equity but can elect the majority of the company’s directors through their ownership of a special class of stock.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management, which owns about 7.7 percent of the Times’s stock, has proposed allowing the company’s shareholders to hold a nonbinding vote on the two-class structure at its 2007 annual meeting.
The company has rebuffed the resolution.
