It’s summer for our readers in the Northern Hemisphere – so time for a seasonal break. After a very busy and interesting 8 months watching FTSE100s wrestle with their DRRs under the new UK regulations, it’s time for them and us to take a well-deserved break.
The final AGMs of the March year-end FTSE100 companies were held last week. As with the companies the week before (see our previous blog post), the two companies holding their AGMs both received high shareholder support for their DRRs. Vodafone received votes in favour of 96.0% for the policy report and 97.3% for the implementation report, and National Grid received similar votes with 96.3% in favour of the policy report and 99.0% in favour of the implementation report. In other words, much less excitement than that which surrounded the first four DRRs that were voted on, each of which were followed in short order by a clarifying addendum.
We are still awaiting the publication of Sports Direct’s DRR; there is then likely to be a lull in activity over the summer before the June year-end companies start to publish their DRRs.
In other news, it was announced last week that the GC100 and Investor Group met in June and decided not to amend or re-publish any of its guidance in 2014. However, the Group is intending to publish a paper “later in the year to clarify certain aspects of the guidance”. It will be interesting to see what it clarifies – perhaps, following a number of companies receiving large votes against their DRRs, there will be more detail on what constitutes “significant” and what is expected in the DRR next year(see our previous blog post for details on what the guidance currently says about a “significant” vote against).
The Bank of England’s Prudential Regulatory Authority also released a policy statement in relation to clawback and the new rules to be implemented from 1 January 2015 (see our blog post for details).
As there are now no outstanding FTSE100 AGMs and as suggested at the beginning of this post, we will give the weekly updates a summer holiday. However, we will keep you updated whenever there is anything of note to report in the DRR and AGM world. Our single source document is also available with links to all the FTSE100 DRRs published so far and the AGM voting results.
