Today Reuters posted a 26-minute podcast interview between Sustainable Business Correspondent Ross Kerber and the director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project, Paul Chesser (pictured above), in which they discussed the shareholder activism landscape; NLPC’s agreements it reached with companies like American Express and Goldman Sachs on its DEI proposals; and Chesser’s views on how the shareholder proposal process has been affected under the leadership of Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins.
An excerpt from the edited transcript published by Reuters:
Q: Let’s talk about Paul Atkins, Chairman of the SEC, appointed by President Trump. You have been very critical of his overall approach and the agency’s approach to the balance of shareholder power.
A: He’s basically just shifted fully in support of corporations being able to exclude proponents regardless.
Q: Atkins and before him, Commissioner (Mark) Uyeda, when he was acting chair, have done a couple of other things that have swung the pendulum toward companies and away from investors. One action was the change in how notices of exempt solicitation work (a process that allowed small shareholders to use the SEC’s EDGAR system to distribute notices soliciting support for shareholder votes). Now you feel like you’ve been cut off from that?
A: I have been cut off from that. So the rule for exempt solicitations is that anyone who holds more than $5 million worth of stock in an individual company, and they go out and try to solicit support for votes on their position on a proxy, whether it’s a shareholder proposal or for or against a director or a slate, you have to disclose that through the (SEC’s) EDGAR system. What the EDGAR system does is it disseminates to anybody who’s subscribed for a company. A number of us who had less than $5 million in stock in an individual company would file voluntary notices of exempt solicitation. We would use those as a vehicle to articulate our positions on other items. Those became, I guess, too much for the corporate lawyers to stomach and for the companies to stomach.
We’re still doing our thing. We haven’t been inhibited.
The full interview by Ross Kerber with Paul Chesser can be watched in its entirety here.
