Want Extra Votes For The Disney Annual Meeting? Someone Paid $100k for 500,000 Votes

As the battle is heating up with the Proxy war being waged against the Walt Disney Company by activist investor groups Trian Partners and Blackwell Capital, every vote could count towards the outcome. Now, it seems that if you want more votes than you currently have shares for, you can buy someone else’s votes. Someone reportedly paid $100,000 for 500,000 votes, which is pennies on the dollar for shares that would normally cost you over $56 million. 

A new company called the Shareholder Vote Exchange lets people buy and sell votes for various companies, and the Walt Disney Company is one of those.

Currently, there are over 20,000 Disney votes listed for sale on the SVE website.

They even let you know what the issues you will get to vote on are. 

For the Walt Disney Company, the following is a list of what you can vote on.

• Election of Directors – Decide who will be on the board of directors
• Ratification of Accounting Firm – Appoint the company’s auditor
• Executive Compensation – Approve compensation of the company’s executives
• Other Shareholder Proposals – Vote on other shareholder proposals, often relating to      ESG matters
• Severance Pay – Vote on executive severance, also known as golden parachutes

It’s unclear how many votes have been sold in total, but we do know that the top payout was $100k for 500k votes. We have arrived at a point where someone, be it the Walt Disney Company, one of the activist investor groups or someone else is buying up 500k votes. 

April 3 is going to be interesting.

What do you think? Comment and let us know!

Source: The Hollywood Reporter