One of Yahoo largest and most critical shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors, said on Monday it had asked for a probe of last week’s shareholder vote which showed strong support for Chief Executive Jerry Yang.
Yang has been under pressure for months over failed negotiations to sell the company to Microsoft and questions about Yang’s leadership, but last Friday’s shareholder vote appeared to show strong support for him and his team.
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the questions over the vote, said that Capital Research believed there should have been more opposition logged for Yang, who received 85 percent support in the results announced on Friday.
Investors holding nearly 76 percent of Yahoo’s 1.38 billion shares gave solid support for all nine directors, with the lowest level of support at 78 percent.
Yahoo said in a statement that it was not party to any errors that may have been made in the vote.
Capital Research Global Investors Portfolio Manager Gordon Crawford in May had said he was “extremely angry” at Yang in the course of the negotiations with Microsoft.
Great post – there is more to it “behind the scene”.
UPDATE
Today Yahoo acknowledged that errors by an independent intermediary in tabulating board-election votes resulted in an understatement of withheld votes, an error that had a dramatic effect on CEO Jerry Yang’s total.
The errors didn’t change the results of the election, but the scale of the withheld votes is a significant blow for Yang, Chairman Roy J. Bostock and Director Ronald Burkle. Corporate elections, where candidate are usually unopposed, tend to produce extremely lopsided victories for incumbents.
Yang, whose withheld total more than doubled to 33.7% after the recount, has been under pressure from some shareholders who believe he botched negotiations with suitor Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).
Bostock and Burkle also saw their totals climb sharply to 39.6% and 37.9%, respectively, with the recount.