Schlumberger, one of the stocks in my portfolio of about 50 companies, has an Apr 06, 2011 Annual Meeting coming up. I’ve decided to vote early this time, since I’m in New Orleans and may be too busy to research much while there. I checked in with MoxyVote.com, ProxyDemocracy and OTPP.
MoxyVote had no recommendations as of 3/29, as I post this, but I expect they will soon. OTPP voted against the proposal to increase authorized common share capital. I voted with them on that issue. At ProxyDemocracy I see that Trillium voted against all directors. Maybe they’re doing it because Schlumberger is second only to Halliburton in providing fracturing services to natural gas companies? I don’t know.
Florida SBA voted against Tony Isaac and K. Vaman Kamath. AFSCME voted against Chairman and CEO Andrew Gould. I went with these recommendations. Maybe it is just me but $9 million in options awarded to Gould last year on top of the rest of his pay for a total of about $15 million just seems over the top.
For say when on pay, I went with annual, along with disclosed votes by CBIS, Florida, Trillium and AFSCME. When I checked on 3/27 ProxyDemocracy was showing that CalPERS voted with management for a frequency of every two years. However, after contacting CalPERS I learned they actually voted for annual voting on SWOP. Both parties looked into the glitch and as of 3/28 it was fixed.
I also voted against the officers compensation proposal. As I said before, $15 million for Gould seems over the top to me. I’m not sure where the cut-off point is for reasonable pay but as long as shareowners approve such packages the averages will keep ratcheting up and the disparity between the top 1% and the rest of us will continue to grow. We need to ratchet down the Lake Wobegon effect.
For all other proxy items, I voted with management using the MoxyVote platform.
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