SiliconBeat

Apple shareholders will be getting a “say on pay” after all.

Beginning next year, Apple will allow investors to have an annual advisory vote on its executive pay packages, the company said Monday in a statement. After repeatedly saying that shareholders had lost a vote on the matter at its annual meeting in February, Apple acknowledged in the statement that it had miscounted shareholder votes, mistakenly counting abstentions as no votes.

In a post on Friday, I noted that Apple seemed to have changed the way it counts shareholder votes over the last year. More shareholder votes were cast in favor of “say on pay” this year than last, and the gap between yes and no votes on the matter had widened. Despite that, Apple said last year that the matter had passed, while saying this year that it failed.

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Sometime in the last year, Apple seems to have changed the way it tallies shareholder votes.

At its annual meeting with investors in February, Apple announced that shareholders had voted down all investor-sponsored proposals, including a widely watched one that urged the company to allow shareholders to vote every year on its executive compensation practices.

The result was something of a surprise, given that a similar say-on-pay proposal had passed the previous year and the say-on-pay movement has been gaining strength ever since.

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Shareholder meetings tend to be either dull or contentious — and occasionally informative. What they aren’t usually is light-heartened.

Apple’s annual meeting Wednesday certainly had its dull moments. It had some contentious ones. And it did offer some a few tidbits for the faithful.

But it also had its moments of levity. During a question-and-answer session following the formal vote taking at the meeting, one shareholder took note that Tuesday was the birthday of Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO who is out on medical leave. After wishing Jobs well, the shareholder got the audience to stand up and join him in singing “Happy Birthday” to the company’s co-founder.

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Intel will be the first Silicon Valley company among the vanguard of public companies in the United States that will ask shareholders this year to express their approval or disapproval of the way the company compensates its top executives.

The announcement came via Read the rest of this entry »

In our e-mail today was the text of a posting by the director of publications at the RiskMetrics Group, Ted Allen. (It was forwarded to us by Gary Lutin at The Shareholder Forum, which is currently hosting an ongoing forum on “Say on Pay” and acts as a clearinghouse of information on the topic. Allen’s post is titled “A ‘New Opening’ for Investors,” referring to the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

A study of the nation’s largest institutional investors says that the “majority” of them do not support “say-on-pay” efforts to require shareholder votes on executive compensation, according to the Center on Executive Compensation, which says it is “dedicated to developing and promoting principled pay and governance practices and advocating compensation policies that serve the best interests of shareholders and other corporate stakeholders.”

In fact, “only a quarter of the institutions” queried were in favor of say-on-pay proposals.” The study also claims that large institutional investors are “not generally” concerned with Read the rest of this entry »