Capital Research Global Investors owns, with related but separately managed funds, around 16% of the outstanding shares of Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), and hasn't been too pleased with the leadership of CEO Jerry Yang. So it advised its funds to vote against reelecting him to the board of directors.
Now the fund is puzzled that Yang managed to get 85% of the votes cast in election. Given that it meant to withhold its 16% stake from supporting Yang, it's concerned that -1% of the company's other shareholders did the same.
Capital Research has hired independent vote counter Broadridge Financial Solutions to take a look and try to figure out what happened.
Yahoo was quick to defuse any conspiracy theories, issuing a statement saying that "Yahoo did not participate in the execution of the votes and was not a party to any errors which may have been made either by a voting institution or a proxy processing intermediary acting on behalf of banks, brokers and institutions."
We won't know anything until the results of the Broadridge recount are made public but it sure seems like the shareholder support of Yahoo is less widespread than it seemed. That's understandable given the stock's dismal performance in recent years.
Large Yahoo shareholder raises questions about vote on Yang
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-05-2008 @ 10:43AM
Jeff said...
As a shareholder, I can tell you that something seems a little suspicious. I received a proxy ballot, along with a notice saying that because of the Icahn agreement, any previous proxy I'd responded to had been invalidated. Only problem is, I didn't receive it until the day AFTER the stockholder's meeting, meaning that Yahoo voted my shares the way they wanted to because I missed the voting deadline. I'm guessing I'm not the only one affected by this, so it looks like Yahoo rubber-stamped its board without letting the voters have their say.