Despite the relatively quiet season on the whole, we, and our Team of 50 Independent Inspectors of Election, experienced more weird and wacky events than ever before – and more events where corporate managers, and in many cases their outside counsel too, seemed way behind the curve.
The big spring meeting season was surprisingly uneventful on the whole – with lots of proxy-access proposals passing – or being adopted voluntarily – and with most says-on-pay sailing by with 90%+ margins…much as we’d predicted.
Back when the Volkswagen scandals first began to break – which seems like ages ago now – we warned readers that ethics and compliance issues were certain to move to the top-of-mind where shareholders of every stripe are concerned.
How we communicate with each other, investors, and consumers is rapidly changing
We last issued our primer on tabulating and reporting on shareholder meeting votes in 2009 – and, since then, there have been so many changes in the landscape, we realized that an updated version was due…right about now…so here it is:
The 2015 Industry Index Helps Us Get To Safe Shores
The first, and perhaps the most urgently needed step, we say, is for issuers to review the Terms and Conditions governing their own plan, and revise them so that any time the Plan balance is less than one full share, the Plan Agent will, henceforth, liquidate the fractional share, send a check, and close the account.
As we’ve noted in previous issues, your editors, and many of our savvier and busier friends, have been trying to clean up most of our smallish DRP and DSPP accounts. Why? Because of all the paperwork they generate – but also to be able to consolidate all our investments in a single place.
Transfer agents take a lot of heat – from shareholders – and sometimes from their clients too, although, after all, that’s what you really pay them to do.
New Executive Director of the Shareholder Services Association
An Interview with Ellen Philip & Cal Donly Of Ellen Philip Associates
“Gentleman: 2015 set an all-time record for mergers, acquisitions and spin-offs. With a truly astonishing $4.7 trillion in deals announced, and with so many of the deals involving “mega-cap companies”, we imagine that the impacts on Computershare and on Georgeson Were significant ones. So… for starters….”
An Interview With Michael Mackey, President, Alliance Advisors, LLC
An 18-year-old Connecticut high-school senior with his sights set on a career in nursing has been named the winner of the 2016 award under the James R. Smith Scholarship Program of the Shareholder Services Association.
This exercise requires deep thinking – and some somewhat elaborate math that needs to be ‘made simple’ for readers who are not professional economists.
At long last, the problems and perils of poorly-conceived and poorly executed share-buyback programs are starting to get the attention they deserve.
In mid-February our good buddy Broc Romanek, editor of The CorporateCounsel.net forwarded a question he got from one of his many avid readers, as follows:
In last year’s wrap-up of the 2015 shareholder meeting season we predicted that more and more companies would go back to actually trying to make the meetings more inviting – and more useful to shareholders.
“Do not try this at home” – even if you think you have a good safety net: You will almost certainly find yourself “in over your head” one day, you will likely leave a lot of votes ‘on the table’ as unvoted…and, worst of all, your tabulation will have virtually no credibility if challenged.
We first published this article in 2003 and, believe it or not, it didn’t need much updating until recently, other than to note that there has been a very good market for buyers of TA services and a very difficult one for sellers throughout this long period of industry contraction.
Your editor-in-chief was fortunate to have been a witness to dozens and dozens of ‘performances’ by the Gilbert brothers at shareholder meetings, where he came to know them both.
Goodbye and Good Riddance We Say, To Those 20+ Page RFPs with their 200-Page Responses
