Monday 2 March 2020

NMC Health voting rights

I spent a bit of Sunday trawling through NMC annual reports and RNS announcements. If you look at the disclosed shareholders in the annual reports you can figure out the holdings of the controlling shareholders. If you then look at the AGM results you can see both the total ISC and how much was voted. And because of the requirement to report the votes on independent NEDs both with and without controlling shareholder votes you can figure out what number the company put on controlled votes at the time of the AGM.

Looking at the 2015 AGM the numbers are exactly the same - combined voting rights disclosed in the annual report matched all votes cast minus minority shareholder votes cast. Looking at the 2017 AGM it's basically the same too. At the 2016 AGM it looks like 47.5m insider shares weren't voted, which is roughly B R Shetty's disclosed shareholding in the annual report for that year. Not sure why that might have happened. (Incidentally my initial calculation, which I'll look at again, suggests the reported turnout from the free float at the 2016 AGM was 96%, which seems high).

At the 2018 and 2019 AGM results it looks like 6.7m and 6.8m insider shares weren't voted at the respective meetings. This may be related to the fact that Shetty pledged 7m shares (but not 6.7m or 6.8m) to Goldman Sachs as part of a financing deal, about which NMC has provided more information today.


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