meetingwent to the meeting today, it was interesting
organizing proxies was more effort than anyone was prepared to do so two of us went down with only 7.5 mill shares to vote, most of the shareholders in our group pre voted or didnt bother
after hearing all the complaints and negative talk about the KGHM deal I assumed there would be a lot of no votes registered and I thought maybe our votes might make a difference, was I ever wrong
I would have voted yes if my votes where needed to approve the deal cause I didnt like the uncertainty of a no vote, I didnt hear any reasonable alternatives suggested, and I didnt see a new board of directors standing up to take over, so I didnt like the KGHM deal but I had to agree with directors that at this time it was the best they could do
it was obvious from the lack of calls over the last week and the confidence of directors at the meeting that the pre-vote was large enuf that they didnt need our votes to pass the resolution, so we voted no
my recollection of the vote counts
101 mill votes had registered which is about 58% of the votes, thats a big number for this type of meeting
91.5 mill yes including
18.5 mill Teck
15 mill KGHM
7 mill Directors/Mgmt
51 mill other (institutions and ????)
9.5 mill no vote including
7.5 mill voted by us at the meeting
2 mill yes pre voted
there where 75 mill shares that didnt vote and there where many shareholders who claimed to be voting no yet only 2 mill shares other than the ones we voted at the meeting where actually voted as no, so I guess a lot of people either changed their minds or they just didnt bother
even if you dont count the 15 mill shares they issued to KGHM and the 5 mill shares they issued to teck just before deadline you still get the deal approved by 89%, so this deal was solidly supported by almost all shareholders.
Im still very unhappy about the performance of management over the last 7 years, from 2003-2009 they spent about $70 mill in cash and shares to develop afton and now its sold for $35 mill, to me that sounds like a long term failure