Suuure, just ask Steve "Freedom from Porn" Jobs about it...
"the board must not be an executive management team's poodle"
...and you will get an earful about how magically the board always think what the Puritan-in-Chief does.
Iron Mountain's returning CEO has moved quickly to reach an accommodation with activist investor Elliot Management, being willing to sell-off the digital business, close unprofitable international operations, return cash to shareholders, and evaluate becoming a REIT. Scenting that stockholder opinion was in line with that of …
> Iron Mountain becoming a Real Estate Investment Trust... lowering its tax burden.
So Iron Mountain is a secure document storage/shredding/etc company?
Who I'm supposed trust to securely store/shred/etc my documents
And their strategy is to pretend to be real estate vendors as a tax dodge - that sounds very trustworthy!
I believe the proposal is to create a REIT to own the buildings (and occasional iron mine) and an operating company to actually run the business. The operating company then pays rent to the real estate company. The overall structure has benefits due to how REITs are taxes. I would imagine that the bulk of the cost of running records storage is in the real estate. Certainly all of the investment is in building warehouses that can store 1+ million cubic feet of paper.