Baring it all

Arkansas Business, June 8, 2009

As ArkansasBusiness.com was the first to report, Barington Capital Group of New York sold virtually all of its stock in Dillard's Inc. between Dec. 31 and March 31.

That's what its Form 13F filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission show.

We tried to get someone from Barington to explain why it had abandoned a company in which it had shown such a ferocious interest--including writing colorful, critical public letters to CEO William Dillard II and the independent corporate directors.

"We are not available for comment," Barington CFO Jared Landaw said in an e-mail response.

Here's what we do know:

In the first three quarters of 2007, Barington bought some 2.6 million shares of Dillard's stock, which at that time was an investment of close to $90 million. Dillard's stock price briefly reached $40 in May of that year--possibly because a New York newspaper reporter mistook Bill Dillard's mission to sell Acxiom Corp. (of which he is a director) as a mission to sell Dillard's.

Anyway, it was the stock's high-water mark for the 21st century. It was also Barington's high-water mark.

As of June 30, 2007, Barington's holdings had a total value of $517.1 million, of which $93.2 million was Dillard's stock. It picked up a few thousand more shares of DDS in the following quarter, but since then had been gradually backing out of a stock whose value tumbled by more than 90 percent before heading back up to the $11 range.

The biggest sell-off happened in the fourth quarter of 2008, when Barington reduced its Dillard's holdings from 1.8 million shares to just 828,445 shares. In the first quarter of this year, it sold all but 1,634 shares, which were valued at a mighty $9,000 as of March 31.

The Barington fund's total value has decreased almost as much as its Dillard's stock. The total value at the end of March was $48.5 million.