Reader ‘J’ was kind enough to give this desk the heads-up, thank you, sir.
Here’s the NR, here’s a section of the voting results table:
I mean, even the other 83% and 84% approval votes aren’t much to boast about and there was a rough 17m block vote that went against every member of the gang, but it seems that Mr. David Pathe has picked up an extra special fanclub along the way and escaped being voted down by the slimmest of margins (it only needed another 3.5% or so of votes to show up against him and that would have been that). But why was he so unpopular? We get a clue in the NR footnotes:
“1 Sherritt believes
that the percentage of votes withheld for David Pathe was negatively
impacted by a practice known as “empty voting” whereby shareholders
exercise their legal right to vote after selling their positions. More
specifically, Sherritt believes that one of its largest institutional
investors disposed of much, if not all, of its position subsequent to
the record date of the meeting, and nevertheless withheld its vote
against Mr. Pathe. Mr. Pathe would have received 74.54% votes in favor
without the impact of this “empty voting” had this shareholder’s votes
not been so withheld. Sherritt experienced a turnover of 112,082,964
shares, or 28% of its outstanding shares, during the five-day period
following the record date of April 25, 2019. The Canadian Coalition for
Good Governance has categorically rejected empty voting as a practice
because it undermines the tenets of majority voting.”
One man’s empty vote is another’s protest vote, of course. And if we look at the share price chart for S.to in the period, we get an idea of the price change that 112m share churn caused:
As reader J rightly pointed out, being willing to accept a big loss like that just to try and vote down one single board member is true dedication to a cause, Pathe must have really pissed them off.