Digital shareholders meetings could recreate some of the buzz we lost
A n unruly annual shareholder meeting is a fine thing. Small investors, who rarely have a voice during the rest of the year, get a chance to look the directors in the eye and deliver an unfiltered blast from the outside world.
The board of Barclays, during one of the bank’s many mega-bonus disgraces, endured two hours of fury at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 2014 in a classic of the genre. The directors deserved to hear it in person. At BSkyB in 2003, the body language between a prickly Rupert Murdoch, as chair, and an awkward James Murdoch, the fresh-faced new chief executive, was fascinating as the former was obliged to address the charge of nepotism.
Sometimes retail punters arrive with zingers. One remembers the aristocratic Sir Anthony Tennant, who later came a cropper at Christie’s auction house, being ambushed as chair of Guinness in the late 1990s with the line “better an empty house than a bad tenant”. Liquid freebie refreshments – standard in those days – may have assisted the cheering from the floor.
There is genuine drama when former bosses turn up to damn their successors. Sir Ken Morrison, at the age of 82, emerged from his farm in 2014 to tear into Morrisons’ then chief executive, Dalton Philips. “I have something like 1,000 bullocks and, having listened to your presentation, Dalton, you’ve got a lot more bullshit than me,” he said to applause from hundreds of private shareholders. The impact would have been lost over Zoom.
But here’s the sad fact: 99% of shareholder meetings aren’t like that. Even some FTSE 100 companies can struggle to raise a couple of dozen attenders. Resolutions are usually foregone conclusions because City institutions have voted their block stakes in advance. Meanwhile, dreary
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