Gibson Dunn's "Shareholder Proposal Developments During the 2018 Proxy Season" covers shareholder proposal statistics, voting results, key topics and trends for proposals submitted and reported on in ISS's databases up to June 1st for 2018 annual meetings, and noteworthy SEC no-action requests and determinations for the period October 1, 2017 - June 1, 2018.
The always-informative annual coverage also includes key insights on these and other hot topics:
- The continued popularity of E&S proposals - with the largest subcategories being anti-discrimination & diversity-related proposals and climate change proposals, respectively
- The significant increase in proposals withdrawn, which lagged only slightly the number of proposals excluded pursuant to a no-action request
- Instructive takeaways from no-action determinations that included a board analysis in accordance with SLB 14I and - somewhat relatedly - the significant decline YoY in successful "ordinary business" no-action requests (from 74% to 58%)
- The increasingly significant number of exempt solicitation filings by institutional and individual investors - 140 filings as of June 19th compared to 119 and 98 as of the same dates in 2017 and 2016, respectively