Feb 6, 2023 | 2022 Q4, Featured, Issues
One-time upstart Okapi Partners has been ranked as the number-one activist proxy solicitor, both in the U.S. and globally in 2022 - for the fourth year in a row - in Bloomberg’s Global Activism Market Review, below. We hasten to point out, as we always do, that the...
Oct 26, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q3, Featured, Inspectors of Election, Issues
Here is our own model template for the Inspectors Final Report on the Voting that has been widely used and adapted to changing circumstances over the years, but where a few ”slips” have slipped in at many companies whose own forms we review when our IOEs are newly...
Oct 26, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q3, Featured, Inspectors of Election, Issues
Recently, Wendy Shiba - a former law professor and the former Corporate Secretary of three NYSE listed companies - and one of our many superstar Inspectors - emailed to point out an unusual quirk in California’s Corporate Code: The code was amended back in 2014 to...
Oct 17, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q3, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Proxy
Governance guru Jim McRitchie’s post on his Corp.Gov.com website - with his review of a survey on 31 virtual annual meeting practices conducted by the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility - was amplified considerably by a John Jenkins post on...
Oct 17, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q3, Activist Investors, Featured, Issues
August 16th was a mighty bad day for three big companies - with big WSJ headlines announcing “Cardinal Health Under Pressure” as activist investor Elliott Management seeks “a handful of seats on the board,” in an effort to jumpstart the stock price…”Third Point Buys...
Oct 17, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q3, Annual Meetings, Featured, Transfer Agents
But Wait! Shocking Deficiencies In Internal Controls Are Set To Fuel Even More, We Guarantee Over the past three months your editor-in-chief has had three assignments as an expert witness/expert consultant - all involving big stock market losses - and all with the...
Aug 15, 2022 | Featured, Podcasts
Carl Hagberg has chaired and run CT Hagberg LLC since 1992, which helps companies optimize their spending on individual investors and on investor relations programs in general. Carl also heads a team of 50 Independent Inspector of Elections - who, through June 2022,...
Aug 1, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q2, Annual Meetings, Best & Worst Practices, Featured, Issues
May used to be the “old April” for shareholder meetings - but June tied with May this year in our own count, with June meetings rising an astonishing 32.5% vs. 2021. Readers have been asking, “What’s going on here, and why? Ten years or so ago, the end of April marked...
Aug 1, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q2, Annual Meetings, Best & Worst Practices, Featured, Issues
“Why do we need to have a Master Ballot for our Shareholder Meetings - and what exactly does it do?” This has been the most common question our Inspectors of Election have been hearing from clients by far - along with an intimately related and equally important one;...
Aug 1, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q2, Annual Meetings, Best & Worst Practices, Featured, Issues
Over the last two years a mini-debate broke out sporadically over LinkedIn on how best to manage the opening and closing of the polls. Many activist investors felt that they should remain open until after the general Q&A period - and ideally, until the very end of...
Aug 1, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q2, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues
The problem of “meeting congestion” on the busiest meeting dates continues to be a growing issue for issuers - and for their key suppliers: We predict that issuers will increasingly have to vie for favorable meeting dates and times, since at best, there are only eight...
Jul 28, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q2, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
The OPTIMIZER interviews Adam Frederick, Global President, Bill Ultan, Managing Director – Corporate Governance and Greg Reppucci, Senior Director– Sustainability & Corporate Governance Through a combination of savvy strategic acquisitions and a continued focus on...
Apr 25, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q1, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
We have been reporting on comments from ISS - and from several large investors as well - that they would be monitoring Virtual Shareholder Meetings to assure that shareholders will have a meaningful chance to ask questions - and to “engage in a dialogue with...
Apr 25, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q1, Featured, Issues, Proxy
Ever hear this old expression, to indicate a totally unlikely event? Well damned, if pigs aren’t indeed flying high - on the proxy voting front! More kudos to Liz Dunshee for reporting that activist investor Carl Icahn’s fight for the rights of pregnant pigs not to be...
Apr 25, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q1, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
As Liz Dunshee reported in her March 13 blog, “This voting outcome arrives at the same time that the UN Environment Assembly has agreed to negotiate a legally binding treaty to tackle plastics, which many are calling the next ‘Paris Accord.’ That comparison is...
Apr 25, 2022 | 2022, 2022 Q1, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
Not by our reckoning: After reading the ISS assessment in their quarterly update, we went straight to the books - and to our own records of 2022 Shareholder Meetings scheduled as of April 1, 2022. That day, we had 480 meetings booked where our team of Inspectors were...
Mar 15, 2022 | 2021, 2021 Q3, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues
In light of the hundreds and hundreds of shareholder meetings your editors have attended - and especially in light of the many meeting critiques we have published, covering both the best - and the worst meetings - and the many blunders and bloopers we’ve seen - we...
Feb 14, 2022 | 2021, 2021 Q4, Featured, Investor Relations, Issues, Shareholder Services
In the last few weeks of 2021 we had inquiries from three readers on this subject - one of our favorite ones - so we placed calls to a few colleagues who’ve had success here, and reviewed some of our own past articles for other ideas: Peggy Foran, who pioneered the...
Feb 14, 2022 | 2021, 2021 Q4, Featured, Inspectors of Election, Issues, Virtual Meetings
In 2021 - thanks largely to sensible Covid-era precautions - U.S. companies overwhelmingly relied on “Virtual” attendance of Inspectors of Election - and auditor representatives too - at their shareholder meetings. Our sister-company, CT Hagberg LLC, logged fewer than...
Feb 14, 2022 | 2021, 2021 Q4, Featured, Investor Relations, Issues, Shareholder Services
This year, The OPTIMIZER believes that the battle for the management-friendly retail investor vote will be harder to win than ever before - even while the retail vote will be a bigger decider than ever before. Here’s why: Over the past 18 months more than 22 million...
Feb 14, 2022 | 2021 Q4, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
The number-one question we’re being asked as readers gear up for the 2022 Meeting Season, and as Covid cases began rising again, is “What are most companies planning to do this year?” So far, as our sister-company, that will provide Inspectors of Election at over 500...
Feb 13, 2022 | 2021, 2021 Q4, Featured, Proxy
An open letter to issuers, proxy solicitors and advisors and their legal counsel: Dear friends and colleagues; We are pleased and excited to announce that CT Hagberg LLC is now prepared to offer an outstanding roster of Independent Inspectors of Election who stand...
Dec 2, 2020 | 2020, 2020 Q3, Annual Meetings, Featured, Issues, Virtual Meetings
A month or so ago we suddenly realized that a feature that made the best VSMs so special had gone totally unremarked. So we emailed a little preview of the article we intended to write in this issue to our great friends at TheCorporateCounsel.net. “Here’s another...
