Winning from the floor at Spotless in 2001

Progress is being made comrades. The tilt for the Spotless board today was successful in a vote from the floor of the meeting but then was defeated by the proxies, which was not surprising given that the board control about 20 per cent of the company.

Chairman Bryan Blythe worded it as follows as the blue cards went into the air: 'I think in the room Mr Mayne has received some support, but on the proxies he is not elected.'

This is the first time Crikey has been elected to a board on a show of hands and strictly speaking it should have gone to a poll but the chairman had already read out the proxies which were as follows:

For: 8.12 million
Against: 98.12 million
Undirected: 14.13 million.

This was a primary vote of only 7.64 per cent but given that Spotless has performed well over the years, the support from those at the meeting and some non-board proxies was surprising.

The big theme of the meeting was corporate governance and that is what I pushed.

Why is the overpaid executive chairman also chairman of the corporate governance committee? Why doesn't the board have a majority of independent directors? Why are all those executive options being issued without any performance hurdle? What are all these outside interests such as directorships of Healthscope and Ron Evans's chairmanship of the AFL. Given that Ron Evans and Brian Blythe own $180 million worth of Spotless stock, why do they need to draw cash salaries of $2.4 million a year on top of this?

Brian Blythe was friendly after the meeting and we bumped into one old cook who shuffled past. Being the proud owner of 400,000 Spotless shares going back two or three decades, his holding is now worth $2.5 million and he is what you might call a self-funded retiree.

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