A director at Atlanta homebuilder PulteGroup resigned Tuesday, saying the board has locked him out of meetings during a power struggle between the company’s founder and its CEO.
"I hereby resign from the Board of Directors of PulteGroup, effective immediately," Jim Grosfeld wrote in a letter to CEO Richard Dugas. "Since the Board meeting of March 22, I have been excluded from a number of subsequent Board meetings, and therefore see no useful purpose of remaining on the Board."
Grosfeld's sudden exit is the latest twist in an unusually public battle between Dugas, 50, and PulteGroup's 83-year-old founder, William Pulte, who is unhappy with the company's financial results and stock performance, which has lagged rivals' in recent years.
Grosfeld, a former CEO at PulteGroup, was placed on the company’s board late last year at the request of Pulte and his grandson of the same name.
Also on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Pulte had hired a law firm specializing in shareholder activism after missing the deadline to submit proxy proposals for PulteGroup’s shareholder meeting next month in Atlanta.
Last week, the company abruptly announced that Dugas would retire next year, in part because of Pulte’s unhappiness. The founder’s gripes include the company’s Dugas-led headquarters move in 2014 to Atlanta from suburban Detroit.
Pulte has called for Dugas to step down immediately, but PulteGroup’s board said last week that it is happy with Dugas’ leadership.
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