Kamm Resigns as Chairman of Mobot Corp.
Lawrence J. Kamm has abruptly resigned as chairman and president of Mobot Corp., only days before shareholders of the financially troubled robot systems maker were scheduled to vote on a proposal to merge the company with a Houston-based firm.
Kamm’s departure means that Mobot’s annual meeting this Friday will be postponed for about 45 days, according to Elaine McNabb, Mobot’s corporate secretary and controller. McNabb and her husband, David, have replaced Kamm and his wife, Edith, on Mobot’s board. David McNabb is Mobot’s vice president-operations.
Mobot’s other director, James D. Byrne, will serve as chief executive pending completion of Mobot’s merger with Advanced Manufacturing Systems Inc., a Houston-based producer of factory automation systems.
Other than forcing a new proxy statement to be written, McNabb said she did not expect Kamm’s departure to affect the merger.
The AMS merger is actually a reverse acquisition, with the publicly traded Mobot buying AMS for stock but AMS executives taking control of Mobot.
Kamm had planned to step down after the merger in July, so his sudden resignation caused some confusion among company observers. Neither McNabb nor Kamm, reached at home, would elaborate on the resignation, which was announced at a special board meeting Saturday. The company announced the move Tuesday.
Robert Kietzman, AMS chairman, president and chief executive, who has been Mobot’s acting CEO since last fall, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
When he announced the AMS merger proposal last year, Kamm acknowledged that his dream of competing against the large corporations in the robot industry had faded after four years of losses and drained cash reserves.
In a brief interview Tuesday, Kamm, who owns about 13.5% of Mobot’s 2.8 million shares outstanding, said he regrets not having reported separately Mobot’s research and development expenditures from its cost of sales.
Since Mobot was incorporated in 1980, only $20,000 in R&D; has been listed on the books, whereas, in fact, “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in R&D; expenditures have been made, he said.
