June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire investor Carl Icahn won at least one board seat in his proxy battle with biotechnology company Biogen Idec Inc., said Alex Denner, an Icahn associate and nominee for the board.

Shareholders at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen’s annual meeting today cast final votes for a slate of four directors backed by the company’s management or four nominees supported by Icahn. Biogen recessed the voting this afternoon. Icahn filed a lawsuit today in Delaware Chancery Court over the voting being left open.

Biogen, the world’s biggest maker of multiple sclerosis drugs, successfully fended off Icahn’s challenge to the board in 2008 after a failed sale. This year, Icahn made a better case for his dissident slate, said RiskMetrics Group, a New York- based investor advisory firm. The group recommended two of Icahn’s nominees, Denner and Richard Mulligan, citing their experience in ImClone Systems Inc., which Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly & Co. bought in November for about $6.5 billion.

“We know members of our slate have been elected,” Denner said today at the meeting. Icahn, in a telephone interview today, called on Biogen to close the polls.

“They’re stalling,” Icahn said. “They want people to change their votes.”

The company is attempting to block Mulligan’s election, and is “manipulating the annual meeting of shareholders to prevent the votes that have been submitted from being counted,” Icahn said in a statement.

Biogen rose $1.19, or 2.3 percent, to $53.51, at 1:45 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Company Response

“There are certain shareholders who haven’t had the opportunity to vote, and we are trying to give them the opportunity to vote,” Naomi Aoki, a Biogen spokeswoman, said today in an interview.

Responding to the lawsuit, Aoki said, “the chairman has clear authority under company bylaws and Delaware corporate law to recess the meeting in the manner that he did.”

The board may be pondering a change in strategy for the election, given the surprise of at least one dissenting candidate being elected, Geoffrey Porges, an analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York, said in a telephone interview.

“I’m skeptical that this is the kind of situation where materially more value can be created if only one candidate makes it,” Porges said today. “It’s not going to be a very warm welcome for Alex Denner when he goes to his first board meeting.”

The current Icahn slate consists of Denner, Mulligan, Thomas Deuel and David Sidransky, all former directors of ImClone. Icahn Capital LP and Icahn Associates, both based in New York, own about 16 million shares of Biogen, or 5.6 percent, according to an April 1 regulatory filing. That makes Icahn and his funds Biogen’s fourth-largest shareholder, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

To contact the reporters on this story: Elizabeth Lopatto in New York at elopatto@bloomberg.net; Lisa Rapaport in New York at lrapaport1@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 3, 2009 13:49 EDT