Murdoch revolt - all the numbers
December 6, 2015
Make no mistake about it, Friday's News Corp AGM was a big protest against Rupert Murdoch's undemocratic gerrymander. This is part of what was sent to Mayne Report subscribers shortly after the meeting finished.
Almost 60% of the independent News Corp shareholders today backed my resolution to end the dual class capital structure at the annual meeting in New York and the issue has led some of the coverage in the international press. Check out the full voting results here.
Whilst Rupert and his spindoctors were attempting to play it down, you simply cannot deny the power of the numbers. This was quite a revolt, courtesy of the support from powerful proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services and the growing dislike of corporate gerrymanders amongst institutional investors.
News Corp has 985.5 million B class voting shares on issue. After some prodding, Rupert told the meeting my resolution was only supported by 22.9% of the votes cast and he feigned ignorance on the question of whether John Malone's Liberty Media had supported the board.
The statistics show that Malone did use his 188 million shares to join with the Murdoch family's 307 million shares and vote against the resolution. Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is the next biggest shareholder with 56.3 million shares and in previous years he's loudly backed everything Rupert wants, although we can't be absolutely sure this year.
However, there were only 621 million votes against the resolution so when you back out the 495 million shares controlled by Malone and Murdoch, only 126 million independent shares have backed the board.
A total of 184 million shares supported the resolution – 59.35% of the independent shareholders - and based on Friday's closing price in Australia, these were worth $4.82 billion ($US4.31bn).
Malone has to have supported Rupert because he owns more shares than supported the resolution and more shares than didn't vote. The turnout was a very high 82%: 807 million of the 985 million shares on issue voted.
This is the first time shareholders have been able to vote on the gerrymander and the protest is substantial.Rupert won't have Malone to back him next year when I'll be putting up exactly the same resolution, although Rupert's voting stake will rise from 31% to almost 40% as part of the Malone peace deal.
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