Further information

Background:

Decisions at general meetings of listed companies are increasingly being made by fund managers, as the funds hold larger shares. The owners of the fund shares are not involved.

This paper is intended to show in which decision-making situations at general meetings the involvement of fund shareholders makes sense.

Task:

The vast majority of agenda items at general meetings deal with potentially important but essentially non-controversial issues. In these cases, decisions depend on business or legal/regulatory circumstances; personal attitudes, opinions or positions play a subordinate role at best. These decisions can generally be delegated well and in a way that "safeguards interests", for example by assuming the overall objective of maximizing company value.

In individual cases, however, there are also TOPs that are emotionally charged, where approval or rejection depends on other factors, such as the political or social attitudes and opinions of the person making the decision. Examples of this include ESG-oriented investment programs, appointments to supervisory boards or the remuneration of management board members. In order to make such "controversial" decisions, the attitudes and opinions of the person making the decision must be known and communicated in the event of an intended delegation.

This BA/MA will focus on the first part of this delegation process: what are the frequently occurring "contentious" issues in a given year. To this end, with the support of an LLM and with the inclusion of AGM documents from several companies in a given year, a list of controversial agenda items or decision proposals and their order of priority is to be prepared.

Outlook:

Future work could then deal with the follow-up question of how the attitudes of individual decision-makers (shareholders) on contentious issues can be ascertained.