Falling short in 2001 ASX tilt
By Stephen Mayne
February 7, 2008
The following was sent to Crikey subscribers the day after the ASX AGM on October 29, 2001.
Well, surprise, surprise, Crikey is not on the ASX board after yesterday's AGM so Paula is again disappointed that the prospect of a $270,000 3-year sinecure has passed us by. But at least we did better than the Greenie who ran for the Boral board, former Tasmanian Parliamentarian Christine Milne, whose 2.8 per cent primary vote must be worst than anything ever posted with the exception of Crikey's magnificent 0.6 per cent at Westfield Holdings last year.
For the first time in a board tilt, I wrote to the top 100 ASX shareholders because the ASX was kind enough to provide their names and addresses. (Please note recalcitrants such as Fairfax, NRMA and Southern Cross Broadcasting which have yet to do this)
But alas, the primary yes vote was only 10.7 per cent and this slipped to a meagre 7.8 per cent once chairman Maurice Newman pulled more than 3 million undirected proxies out of his back pocket and voted them against Crikey despite my request that he not do this on the grounds of good corporate governance like that displayed by the NAB last year.
Last year I got 18 per cent of the primary which fell to 8.8 per cent after Maurice finished me off with those killer undirected proxies.
My primary vote only fell fractionally from 1.57 million shares last year to 1.53 million this year but the against primary rose from 16.19 million to 18.9 million and Maurice had less sneaky undirected proxies this year.
Yesterday, the three incumbents - Clive Batrouney, Michael Sheppard and Jim Kennedy - got back with 97.1%, 98.8% and 96.7% so it wasn't exactly a close run thing. The club is very tough to break into.
Maurice, who is one of the PM's close mates and is said to have turned on Jonathon Shier in his role as an ABC director, did the right thing in asking all of the candidates to address the meeting for up to 5 minutes.
He was smart in going straight for a poll because I was confident of getting a majority on a show of hands as the discussion at the meeting went well.
I told the meeting it was an affront to shareholders for the board to unilaterally declare there was no vacancy when the ASX constitution provides for up to 15 directors and they only have 9.
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