Voting Trust

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Voting Trust

A trust that common shareholders create in order to combine their votes at the annual meeting. Each shareholder transfers his/her voting rights to the trust, while retaining title to the dividends and other rights associated with the stock. The voting trust receives legal title to the common stock and issues voting trust certificates, representing the other rights of common stock, to shareholders. The voting trust uses these shares to vote as a block. This gives participating shareholders a degree of control over the company that they would not otherwise have. Typically, a voting trust can only exist for a certain period of time, depending on the laws of the state in which the company is incorporated.

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The legality of pooling agreements was uncertain in 1856 and remained so for at least five more years.

20 This was a damaging decision for the English and Scotch pool and for the industry in general, for it meant that pooling agreements could not easily be used as a brake on the development of new or improved competitive routes.

Part of the explanation, however, must be rooted in the individual and collective assumptions, goals, and persuasive powers of railway leaders, who were often willing to undermine the stability of the pooling agreements, and even the financial foundations of their own companies, in order to expand their route structures.

Railway leaders knew that rates agreements by their nature could not contain nonprice competition, but they were equally aware that pooling agreements had not offered a complete solution.

As to whether the pooling agreement contravened any general public act, Page-Wood handed down a ruling that became the standard reference during the next fifty years: "I can see nothing that can be founded on the supposed injury to the public from the prevention of competition.

The companies were still agreed, however, that price competition was to be avoided, and they were therefore prepared to take part in a rates conference, but the instability of the route structure made renewal of the Anglo-Scotch pooling agreement impossible.