MSCI will temporarily treat any securities of companies exhibiting
unequal voting structures as ineligible for addition to the MSCI ACWI Investable Market Index and MSCI US Investable Market 2500 Index," the company said in a statement.
Investors may grouse about
unequal voting rights, but industry observers don't see anything changing for dual-class stock media congloms.
Behind Baker is an empirical assumption that when citizens hold unequal voting weight, their elected representatives will be more attentive to those holding more electoral weight.
The second hypothesis stems directly from citizens' unequal voting power.
After ten years of sustained effort, in the face of an
unequal voting system unfavourable to small parties, a new deputy to the National Assembly was elected.
That it was not is a sad statement about the seriousness with which most Democrats took their party's pledge to "count all the votes this time"--and about the prospects for reform of erratic and
unequal voting systems that, as Conyers and his aides have ably illustrated, are prone to abuses that undermine confidence in America's democratic experiment.
Conversely, where different classes of stock had
unequal voting rights, it would be possible for a corporation to be a member of the "qualified group" even though 80 percent of its voting power represents a far smaller share of its total value.
WASHINGTON -- Concerned about the number of public multi-class stock companies and the resulting potential for harm to shareowners, the Council of Institutional Investors today urged the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to make new companies that have two or more classes of common stock with
unequal voting rights ineligible for listing.
Of these, 79 feature multiclass capital structures with
unequal voting rights and 35 are controlled firms with a single class of voting stock.
The Investment Company Act of 1940 has a policy to prevent investment companies like RHR from issuing stock that has
unequal voting rights or contains inequitable or discriminatory provisions.
For years, Stein and Landry were shielded by an unusual system of
unequal voting rights that entrenched them and protected their salaries and bonuses.
A dual class stock structure, which carries
unequal voting rights, is antithetical to the fair and fundamental principle of a `one-share, one-vote' system and has no place in today's marketplace.
