THE novelist Arnold Bennett had a smoked-haddock omelette named after him by the Savoy; Lemuel Benedict, a retired Wall Street stockbroker with a hangover, claimed to have invented eggs Benedict at the Waldorf.

Now Manhattan’s Il Tinello, an upmarket Italian restaurant a stone’s throw from Central Park, has Pasta alla Icahn. Named after Carl Icahn, the notorious corporate raider, the dish consists of farfalle pasta with tomato, onion and bacon sauce. It sounds very pleasing — which is more than can be said for its namesake.

For the past 30 years, Icahn, now a 72-year-old billionaire, has been terrorising the bosses of ailing companies, snapping up stakes in their businesses before threatening to boot them out.

No company or sector is safe. His targets have included Blockbuster, Marvel Comics, Motorola, MedImmune, Time Warner and the now-defunct airline TWA. It’s a tactic that has paid off for Icahn, who Forbes magazine estimates to be worth $14 billion (£7.2 billion).

Last week Icahn put a new company in his sights: Yahoo, the Silicon Valley internet pioneer that has just escaped a hostile $47.5 billion bid from Microsoft. The two companies had months of on-again, off-again discussions; now Icahn wants to bring them back together — or else.

His opening salvo was typically hostile. In a letter to Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, Icahn said Yahoo directors had “acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders”.

“It is quite obvious that Microsoft’s bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo’s prospects on a stand-alone basis,” he wrote.

Icahn added that “it is irresponsible to hide behind management’s more than overly optimistic financial forecasts”, and called it “unconscionable” that the board had not put the offer to a shareholder vote.

Bostock hit back, saying Icahn had shown a “significant misunderstanding of the facts” and that Yahoo had done all that it could to make a deal with Microsoft, at the right price.

The reply is unlikely to appease Icahn, who is lobbying shareholders to vote out current management at Yahoo’s annual meeting next month. He has put forward 10 of his own people to replace them.

Icahn is no stranger to making big changes at big companies. Sallies against Time Warner and Motorola have proved that size alone doesn’t guarantee impenetrable defence. This time, analysts are betting that Yahoo, too, will be forced to make changes.

Jeffrey Lindsay, internet analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, expects Icahn to come out on top. “I think there will be a good, old-fashioned proxy fight and that it is very likely that Icahn’s slate will be elected,” he said.

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