One of the drawbacks with going public is the potential difficulty of dealing with the public who decide to invest in your business.

With control relinquished, you must rely on those shareholders to toe the line when it comes to how you want to run the business.

You could sense a degree of exasperation from Nigel Payne, chairman of the listed law firm Gateley, when he reflected last week on the company’s annual general meeting.

Payne expressed his ‘disappointment and some considerable degree of frustration’ that only 62% of votes went in favour of a resolution to amend the rulebook to allow virtual AGMs to take place. The required threshold for a resolution to be passed is 75%.

The lack of support was even more curious, as Payne pointed out, given that over the past five years, the average number of non-staff shareholders attending the AGM is less than one. Indeed, none of the institutional shareholders who voted against this resolution had appeared in person at AGM in the nine years that he had chaired the business.

Payne continued: ‘A number of shareholders seem to have followed the direction of voting as recommended by certain unregulated proxy voting advisers, without any consultation with the company.

‘I would like to thank those shareholders that communicated directly with the company and I continue to encourage all shareholders to so engage in future and not to simply follow unregulated advice or indeed vote against board resolutions without the courtesy of first engaging with the company to see if any disagreements or misunderstandings might be resolved.’

That’s democracy for you, Nigel.

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