Thursday 19 May 2011

AFSCME report on mutual fund voting

This is worth a read. The US union AFSCME, with the help of the excellent Fund Votes, has produced a report on which US mutual funds are facilitating executive rent extraction. Here's the blurb:
A new report reveals that the largest mutual funds – including Vanguard, BlackRock, ING and Lord Abbett – are the least likely to use proxy votes to align executive pay with performance. On the other hand, the report finds that many smaller funds tend to vote “against’’ management-initiated compensation proposals, and ‘for’ shareholder Say on Pay proposals. Unfortunately, the pay-enabling influence of the larger mutual fund families greatly outweighs the impact of smaller funds. The report specifically finds that the largest mutual fund family, Vanguard, did the least to constrain executive pay in 2010.
Did I mention that we can't do something similar in the UK because we don't have a mandatory voting disclosure regime?

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