Top SandRidge Investor Wants CEO Out, Possible Sale

• Joe Wertz
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  Joe Wertz was a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma from 2011-2019. He reported on energy and environment issues for national NPR audiences and other national outlets. He previously worked as a managing editor, assistant editor and staff reporter at several major Oklahoma newspapers and studied journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.

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A top SandRidge investor wants the Oklahoma City energy company to consider selling itself and is calling for CEO Tom Ward to step down.

TPG-Axon Capital, an investment firm that owns 4.5 percent of SandRidge’s stock, went after the company’s board of directors in a letter by the firm’s founder Dinakar Singh, reports the Journal Record‘s Brianna Bailey:

The criticism comes just five months after the much-publicized shuffling of Chesapeake Energy’s board of directors, a company Ward helped to found with friend Aubrey McClendon, before leaving in 2006 to found SandRidge.

In the letter, TPG-Axon said shares of SandRidge could be trading for $12-$14 instead of $6, where shares were priced at Wednesday’s close. “SandRidge stock performance has been nothing short of disastrous, on both an absolute and relative basis, since the company’s IPO in 2007,” Singh writes in the letter.

From Reuters:

The hedge fund repeatedly compared SandRidge to Chesapeake Energy Corp, which has been besieged by a governance crisis and liquidity crunch. Ward co-founded Chesapeake with Aubrey McClendon in 1989. Ward joined SandRidge in 2006 and took the company public the following year.