As most of the UK basked in the sunshine last week, eight FTSE100 companies held their AGMs and all companies emerged relatively unscathed. The only company to slightly feel the heat was Experian.

Experian received votes of 87.4% in favour for its policy report and 85.9% for its implementation report. Not disastrous, but probably not as high as its remuneration committee would have liked. In addition, 11.1% of shareholders voted against the re-election of Don Roberts who is now taking over the role as Chairman from Sir John Peace. Shareholders are concerned about Mr Roberts’ independence, as he previously held the role of CEO. It was also third time unlucky for Sir John Peace who has already faced shareholder dissent as a non-executive director at Burberry (see last week’s blog post on Burberry’s result) and as Chairman at Standard Chartered (see our previous blog post for comment on the large vote against the policy report).

The other FTSE100 companies that held their AGMs last week and the votes in favour were:

  • 3i Group (98.1% for the policy report and 98.5% for the implementation report
  • British Land Company (97.3% for the policy report and 97.2% for the implementation report)
  • BT (96.9% for the policy report and 99.1% for the implementation report)
  • Land Securities Group (99.1% for the policy report and 99.7% for the implementation report)
  • London Stock Exchange Group (94.9% for the policy report and 96.9% for the implementation report)
  • Severn Trent (97.7% for the policy report and 99.4% for the implementation report)
  • SSE (99.1% for the policy report and 97.6% for the implementation report)

As you can see, there isn’t too much for remuneration committees to get hot and bothered about here.

One remuneration committee that may have more to fret about is Sports Direct. This week in its long running saga with its bonus scheme, there was a further development when Mike Ashley withdrew from participation in the scheme – see our blog post for more details.

Next week there are five FTSE100 companies holding their AGMs. They will all be hoping to receive votes as high as the seven companies above. The results will all be detailed on our single source document.