CBIZ Shareholders Are Cool With the Grant Thornton Merger, the Deal is a Go

While everyone has been distracted by Anthropic’s S1, another filing slipped past: a Form 8-K filed by CBIZ on October 27. If you didn’t know that Viking ParentCo, Inc. and Viking MergerCo, Inc are Grant Thornton acquisition vehicles, you might have missed this completely.

The long and short of it is that the Grant Thornton/CBIZ merger is a go. Votes for the merger shook out as follows:

Votes for executive compensation were slightly less favorable but still passed by a large margin:

As part of the deal, shareholders will get $55 per share, up from the $47 to $50 first proposed by GT and their private equity overlords New Mountain Capital, which was rejected by the CBIZ board.

The transaction is expected to close on November 2. CBIZ president and CEO Jerry Grisko will pocket about $1.3 million, 25% of it right after the deal and the rest in six months if he’s still around.

Crain’s Cleveland Business has done some great deeper dives into the situation at work here for some further reading:

• Goldman Sachs shopped CBIZ to 24 other buyers. None made an offer.
• Top CBIZ execs get rich incentives — and a safety net — in Grant Thornton deal