Liam Denning, Columnist

Williams: Enough With the Drama Already

It's already got a strategy to survive the downturn.

August 23, 2016 at 4:24 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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Williams Cos. spent much of the past year engaged in a game of hard-to-get with Energy Transfer Equity that morphed into hard-to-understand. Now an activist wants the pipeline company to play hard-to-get-past-it.

Keith Meister, the activist who runs Corvex Management, trashed the board of Williams in a CNBC interview on Monday. He had supported the Energy Transfer deal and, along with five other directors, walked off the board in June after failing to dislodge current CEO Alan Armstrong. Meister now threatens a proxy battle to force the issue, citing a history of failures at Williams under Armstrong's leadership.