Annual Meeting Horror Stories

The Council of Institutional Investors wants your horror stories on barriers to annual shareowner meeting attendance. We’ve been hearing that companies seem to be making investors jump through more and more hoops to attend annual meetings. If you have any horror stories that will help Council staff identify and discourage unreasonable barriers to attending annual shareowner meetings, please notify Council staffer Justin Levis.

Nell Minow told a recent audience, MAXXAM once “moved their annual meeting from Houston, a city you can fly to, to a small city in Texas, Huntsville, that is impossible to reach. They also set the meeting for 8 in the morning and bought up all of the hotel rooms in town. And then they had the chutzpah to put in the proxy, ‘We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at the annual meeting.'” John Chevedden tells me that some serous shareowners actually rented a motor home in order to attend the MAXXAM meeting.

Your story doesn’t have to be that bad to be worthy of passing on to CII. Of course, I’d appreciate letting our readers know about them too.