NEW YORK (AP) — Activist investor Carl Icahn is resigning from Yahoo's board of directors because he no longer has enough time to devote to the Internet company.
In his resignation letter Friday, Icahn praised Yahoo's current CEO, Carol Bartz, whom the board hired in January to engineer a turnaround at the Sunnyvale company.
Bartz replaced Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, whom Icahn had been trying to get fired before he negotiated a truce that put him on the company's board nearly 15 months ago.
Icahn sought Yang's ouster after he turned down an opportunity to sell Yahoo to Microsoft for $47.5 billion last year. Yahoo's market value now stands at $24 billion.
Icahn remains one of Yahoo's major shareholders with a 4.5 percent stake.
Meantime Icahn is urging fellow holders of CIT Group Inc. bonds to oppose the embattled lender's debt restructuring plan.
Icahn said in a letter Friday that bondholders "must not endanger the value of our investment" by voting in favor of the company's plan.
Last week, the lender to small and mid-sized businesses sweetened an offer for bondholders to swap out CIT's current debt for debt that matures later, and some stock. The proposed restructuring is aimed at reducing CIT's near-term debt burden by $5.7 billion.
Icahn's letter said if CIT's balance sheet consisting of loans and other assets is "run off in a controlled way," the value of investors' bonds will be worth at least 80 cents to 85 cents on the dollar, which he argued would be a much better alternative than the restructuring plan.
Under the company's plan, Icahn wrote, "the assets will not be wound down; rather, they will be reinvested in an operating business controlled by the company's current board of directors."
Icahn said the board and senior management have made "Titanic-sized errors" that led to the company's current troubles.
Their plan, he said, would "put our assets at peril," Icahn said.
CIT, which is based in New York, is also asking bondholders to approve a prepackaged reorganization plan should it need to file for bankruptcy protection.
On Monday, Icahn wrote CIT's board, offering to give the company a $6 billion loan as an alternative to the debt restructuring plan. He said his loan would save the company $150 million in fees.
Even if it completes the restructuring, CIT has warned that it might still have to file for bankruptcy protection, but under less favorable terms than under its prearranged plan.
In a prerecorded webcast presentation Friday, CIT CEO Jeffrey Peek said a so-called "free fall bankruptcy" will require "significant new liquidity to preserve asset values, and would create the need to raise even more costly secured financing, resulting in a lower recovery for today's unsecured bondholder."
Shares of CIT ended Friday up two cents at $1.14.
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