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While Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, the original plan with Canadian property giant Brookfield to take over AGL was refuse twice earlier this year, it didn’t stop the tech entrepreneur from trying a third time.
Grok Ventures, Cannon-Brookes’ private investment arm, has announced that the company and its affiliates have acquired an 11.28% stake in the Australian energy giant, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. AGL.
In this new position, Grok Ventures has outlined its intention to vote against the decentralization plans proposed by AGL and has run a campaign calling on AGL shareholders to also vote against it. Grok said it has written to the AGL Board of Directors to outline its intentions.
Under AGL’s divestment plan, the company will be split into two separate businesses: AGL Australia will own the electricity, gas and telecommunications retail business along with its clean energy assets while Accel Energy will continue to retain ownership of coal and gas. – fire generators in Australia.
“The proposed analytics tool will be a catalyst for shareholder value realization. It will create two industry-leading companies with distinct value propositions. It will enable each businesses are valued separately and more aggressively by the market on their particular basis.
However, Cannon-Brookes, principal of Grok, believes that keeping AGL as a company will allow the company to convert to net-zero — a plan the tech billionaire has had in mind for AGL since he started pitching takeover bids. The company also argues that the demerger plan is “suboptimal” and that it will only lead to two weaker, interdependent companies.
“We are at a pivotal moment in Australia’s energy transition and in the future of AGL. It is delivering clean, cheap and reliable energy to millions of homes and businesses. We believe that by keeping the company together, AGL can continue to operate proudly and long as a pioneer in the transformation of the energy market,” said Cannon-Brookes.
“Due to not transitioning away from fossil fuels fast enough, the board presided over AGL’s steep decline to around 70% in five years.
“Old coal plants that sweat, run expensive, and are increasingly falling apart like we are seeing today with Loy Yang A are not economical or responsible. It doesn’t make sense, or a dime.”
The AGL proposed taxonomy has been written and will be completed by June 30, 2022.
The news comes as Cannon-Brookes’ primary vehicle, Atlassian, outline plan about how it will avoid a catastrophic power failure that accidentally disabled some cloud services and almost two weeks to repairand regain the trust of customers.
Some of the actions being taken by Atlassian include setting up a “soft delete” policy that also includes a tested recovery plan, improving backups of key contacts, retrofitting support tools to customers without a valid site URL or Atlassian ID can still contact technical support directly, and review the company’s incident communication manual.
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