Earlier this week, Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) released the summary of results of its annual global voting policy survey. This year’s survey covered a range of issues, including proxy access in the U.S., overboarding for directors and CEOs globally and multiple voting rights in Europe.
In particular regarding proxy access, a large majority of investors believe ISS should issue negative recommendations if management adopts a higher-than-3 percent requirement (and 90 percent of investors seek a negative recommendation if the threshold exceeds 5 percent or if the ownership requirement exceeds three years) or if the aggregation limit is fewer than 20 shareholders (or if a cap on nominees is less than 20 percent of the existing board size).