The XIII Report on Stockholders’ General Meetings of Companies in the IBEX has been presented, a study prepared by the Good Governance and the Stockholders Forum, led by ATREVIA and IESE. Attendance to the Association of Economic Information Journalists (APIE) was made by José Ramón Pin, co-chair of the Good Governance and Stockholders Forum and IESE professor, Asun Soriano, director of the Good Governance and Stockholders Forum and CEO of ATREVIA and Susana Graupera, director of forum studies.
The purpose of the XIII Report on the General Stockholders’ Meetings of the IBEX-35 Companies is to analyze compliances with Good Governance regulations and the relationship of companies in the IBEX with small shareholders. Among the main conclusions of this report and worth mentioning is that, throughout 2017 there was a reduction in the total number of directors, from 460 to 451, which means a drop of less than 2%.
Moreover, this cutback in boards it’s parallel to the participation of women. In fact, the number of female directors has dropped for the first time since the publication of the Code of Good Governance of Listed Companies. The incorporation of women into the Boards of Directors of the Ibex-35 companies has gone from 92 to 90 in 2017. If we project the incorporation rate of women into boards of directors by those of the last five years, it would take almost 47 years to reach parity.
In regards to quorum for General Stockholders’ Meetings, the figures for 2017 remain practically identical to those of the previous year. The gentle downward trend continues, a decline that began in 2015. The average quorum of stockholders present and represented at the Ibex-35 meetings has been 66.69%. However, the number of companies that register a quorum higher than 80% is doubled, from five companies in 2016 to eleven in 2017.
To finalize, companies analyzed in 2017 seem to prioritize meetings with journalists in private as a strategy to explain the measures adopted at the General Stockholders’ Meetings. On the contrary, invitation to attend them or the diffusion of the meetings on social networks has declined. However, 82% of the Ibex-35 companies broadcast the General Stockholders’ Meeting on their social networks, being Twitter (64.7%) and Facebook (44.1%) the most used for this purpose.