Voting Against Directors at Greggs and MAV4

This blog gives you the latest topical news plus some informal comments on them from ShareSoc’s directors and other contributors. These are the personal comments of the authors and not necessarily the considered views of ShareSoc. The writers may hold shares in the companies mentioned. You can add your own comments on the blog posts, but note that ShareSoc reserves the right to remove or edit comments where they are inappropriate or defamatory.

Greggs (GRG) held their Annual General Meeting today. This was a “closed” meeting but with no electronic access provided. Bearing in mind the size of the company, it seems unreasonable that they could not have provided shareholder access.

But I note that the votes reported show that several directors received substantial votes against. For example Ian Durant at 4.8% and Sandra Turner at 7.7%. I wonder why? There were also substantial numbers of votes withheld but no explanation has been given.

One advantage of a physical meeting is that if you see a lot of proxy votes being cast against resolutions you can ask why before the directors close the meeting and depart. Even electronic meetings do not give you that opportunity.

Another company where the directors received substantial votes against recently was Maven Income and Growth VCT 4 (MAV4). But I think I know why in this case. I complained in a previous blog post about the length of service of the directors and suggested shareholders vote against their re-election. At their AGM there were a large number of votes “withheld” on the reappointment of the directors – over 800,000 for all 4 which is usually a sign of disapproval. Perhaps my comments had some impact on shareholders’ votes. They also recorded over 1 million votes against reappointment of the auditors, against disapplication of pre-emption rights and against share purchases, even though voting against share buybacks is usually not a good idea in VCTs. That’s because if the company does not buy-back shares then nobody else may do, with the result there is no share trading in the company’s shares and the discount to NAV widens to a very high figure.

Clearly some shareholders in MAV4 are unhappy. Again there has been no published explanation by the company or commitment to do anything about it.

However you look at it, this is not good corporate governance and the Chairmen of these companies should comment I suggest.

Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson  )

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