Perhaps it’s no surprise that last week was a quieter one on the DRR front than the previous week.  Shareholders had to contend with quite some volume of reading  – over 250 pages of DRR being voted on in one week!

At the 11 FTSE100 company AGMs last week, both sections of the DRR, (namely the policy report and the implementation report) received resounding yes votes for all the companies. Not one company received less than a 90% vote in favour for either section.

The companies that held their AGMs in the week commencing 28 April and the percentage of votes in favour were:

  • ARM Holdings (policy report 97.6% and implementation report 97.5%)
  • Aviva (policy report 96.9% and implementation report 98.1%)
  • British American Tobacco (policy report 90.5% and implementation report 95.3%)
  • GKN (policy report 97.8% and implementation report 99.3%)
  • Intercontinental Hotels (policy report 90.9% and implementation report 94.0%)
  • Rexam (policy report 97.1% and implementation report 98.4%)
  • Rolls Royce (policy report 96.3% and implementation report 94.2%)
  • Schroders (policy report 92.2% and implementation report 94.2%)
  • Shire (policy report 94.7% and implementation report 97.0%)
  • Tullow Oil (policy report 90.8% and implementation report 92.1%)
  • Weir Group (policy report 99.6% and implementation report 99.8%)

As you can see, for most companies the implementation report is receiving a higher positive vote than the policy report. Seemingly, shareholders are more comfortable with approving what has already been paid, than approving a policy that will probably be in place for the next three years (although, to be honest the difference in support levels doesn’t look to be that significant). This is in stark contrast to the positions of Carnival, Astra Zeneca, Barclays and Pearson where the consternation was over what had been paid rather than what would be paid in the future.

After all the press the week before on executive remuneration and Vince Cable’s letter to remuneration committees (see last week’s blog post for details), last week’s positive votes were probably a welcome relief to Remco chairs, shareholders and Dr Cable alike!

In addition last week, the last of the December year end FTSE100 companies, WPP, published its DRR, as did Kingfisher.