|
Forum Report:
Electronic Participation in Shareholder Meetings
Shareholder Rights to Present
Questions, and to Observe
One of the issues identified by Forum participants in the E-Meetings
program is the need to provide shareholders with a right to ask questions,
which also involves an equally important need for all investors to be able
to observe both what is asked and how management responds.
To illustrate the issue, the following recent news reports show how a
range of notable shareholder confrontations have been addressed in
"traditional" in-person meetings, some with webcasts allowing all
investors to witness the exchanges:
These examples are of course exceptional, but the escalated level of
attention of these cases is actually one of the conditions that we need to
consider in deciding what must be accommodated by a broadly applicable
standard of fair conduct.
In viewing the range of practices in these "traditional" meetings, it
should be noted that all of them involve some elements of electronic
communications in what has become a continuum of information exchanges
leading up to an official voting deadline, as described in the
Focus Report of last week's
E-Meetings Review. There really is no such thing today as a
purely in-person meeting, and we must necessarily think in terms of
combined elements of electronic and in-person communications as we
consider the requirements of fair conduct.
GL – May 20, 2010
Gary Lutin
Chairman, The Shareholder Forum
c/o Lutin & Company
575 Madison Avenue, 10th Floor
New York, New York 10022
Tel: 212-605-0335
Email:
gl@shareholderforum.com |