Chevedden, Steiner and McRitchie filed 75 proposals so far in 2014; six received majority support, Proxy Monitor 2014 says
About 70 percent of all individual-sponsored shareholder proposals at Fortune 250 companies this year were introduced by three people and their family members who often work together, according to a study by Proxy Monitor.
John Chevedden, William Steiner and James McRitchie filed a combined 75 of the 107 individual-sponsored shareholder proposals as of July 30 this year – a period accounting for shareholder meetings of 219 of the Fortune 250 companies, Proxy Monitor says. Of the proposals filed by the three this year, six received majority support.
‘In general, these activists – who have a history of working together – have focused on corporate governance-process proposals that are more likely to gain traction with voting shareholders than are proposals focusing on social or policy issues,’ Proxy Monitor writes in a 2014 report.
Chevedden, who has filed 32 proposals this year and, along with his family, has filed 232 proposals since 2006, is the top so-called ‘corporate gadfly,’ Proxy Monitor says. The 68-year-old MBA graduate, who started in shareholder activism in 1994 after he was laid off by a unit of General Motors, accounts for 21 percent of all individual-sponsored shareholder proposals at Fortune 250 companies since 1996, Proxy Monitor says.
Steiner, who, together with his family has filed 28 proposals this year and 215 since 2006, frequently works together with Chevedden, Proxy Monitor says. Steiner is based in New York and has been filing shareholder proposals since the 1980s. He has recently been joined in filing by his son, Kenneth.
McRitchie, who blogs about corporate governance at Corpgov.net, has entered the scene more recently, filing 15 proposals so far this year after filing nine last year and five in each of the previous two years.
Proxy Monitor says the influence of the three may be declining, as indicated by lower-than-average support for their proposals this year, because of ‘the adoption, at many larger companies, of some of the ideas that gadflies and shareholder-proposal activists have espoused, including declassifying boards of directors, eliminating supermajority voting provisions in corporate bylaws, and requiring that directors be elected by a majority of voting shareholders.’
