“Age is just a number. It’s totally irrelevant unless, of course, you happen to be a bottle of wine.” – Joan Collins, actress.
Seifi Ghasemi, the Iranian born CEO of the American company Air Products, was removed from the industrial gas giant’s Board of Directors in January 2025. At the time of his removal, Ghasemi was 81 years old and had served as Chairman, President and CEO of the company since 2014.
Air Products, a New York Stock Exchange listed company, is a market leading energy company whose principal business is selling gases and chemicals for industrial use. Their liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, for instance, are used by NASA to power the external tanks for their space shuttles.
Did Ghasemi step off the board voluntarily or was he pushed over the cliff?
Mantle Ridge, a big time institutional investor, with over $1 billion invested in Air Products, embarked on a rigorous activist campaign in 2024 to remove Ghasemi and inject some new blood into the Air Products board. In a poetic twist of corporate fate, Mantle Ridge’s CEO Paul Hilal, had himself led the previous activist challenge that had got the then 71- year-old Ghasemi appointed as the CEO of Air Products a decade earlier.
In 2024, Mantle Ridge led a sustained campaign to remove Ghasemi, leading with a “RefreshingAirProducts” website that adroitly made the case for change and showcased the director candidates that they wished to push forward for election at the January 2025 shareholder meeting. The case for change was summarised thus:
“Over the past five years, Air Products has significantly underperformed its industry peers, the S&P 500, and its own potential due to its flawed strategy, inappropriately high-risk capital allocation programme and poor execution. The root cause of these issues is a range of oversight and governance failures at the Board level, including its failure to replace CEO & Chairman Seifollah “Seifi” Ghasemi.
The five-year relative total shareholder return (“TSR”)1, ending October 4, 2024, the day before announcing our efforts to press for change catalysed a nearly 10 percent jump in the Company’s shares, tells a powerful story – Air Products has delivered roughly one-half of the TSR of competitor Air Liquide and the S&P 500, and less than one-third of the TSR of best-in-class competitor Linde Plc.”
Crisscrossing the country to meet with key institutional investors, Paul Hilal together with the CEO candidate Eduardo Menezes, a former Linde Plc senior executive, made a strong case for why change was necessary.
They pushed the argument that the Air Products Board lacked the gumption to change the CEO, that the company’s capital allocation was wanting and that the risky projects it was undertaking were destroying shareholder value. The website campaign was withering in its contempt for Ghasemi’s tenure:
“Despite these missteps, the Board has allowed Mr Ghasemi – 10 years into his tenure and now 80 years old – to frustrate the Board’s efforts to replace him, and in fact to further increase his leverage over the Board. His purpose is to perpetuate his dominion through enhancing leverage and control, rather than earn an extension of his tenure by delivering strong performance. His own words tell the story: “I am not going anywhere”, “I am leaving this Company only one way – feet first”, “I will be Chairman of this Company so long as I am vertical”, “I always tell these people they get rid of me when I go horizontal”, and “I will be the first 100-year-old CEO”.
The Board’s rejecting out of hand Mr Eduardo Menezes as a CEO candidate reveals that its priority is not maximising shareholder value, but perpetuating control and protecting prior decisions. Mr Menezes would bring fresh-eyed scrutiny and run the Company to maximise its value without regard to legacy decision making.”
Who wouldn’t listen to an investor who had put in a billion dollars worth of money where their mouth was? At the January shareholder meeting, three out of the four activist driven candidates were elected, including Paul Hilal himself and Dennis Reilley, a 71-year-old industrial gas industry executive.
Reilley, who has previously served as Chairman, President and CEO of Praxair which was acquired by industrial gas giant Linde Plc, is now the Vice Chairman of the Air Products Board.
In early February 2025, Ghasemi who despite board removal was still the substantive CEO, was ousted from the role and Eduardo Menezes was appointed in his place. Paul Hilal’s activism was a resounding success, again.
But was Ghasemi’s initial CEO appointment a decade before, an error of judgement on Hilal’s part? Was it fair to play the age card against him, when Hilal had pushed for Ghasemi’s CEO appointment at the age of 71 years? I’ll discuss that next week.
The writer is a former banker and is currently a corporate governance specialist.
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