Editorial Oh for more “One-Share Sweeneys”

With annual meeting time once again rolling around, our editorial staff will be called upon to attend several hundred. All too many, we fear, will prove routine and boring, with little more than a hand picked corporate quorum on hand for a ten minute affair to elect directors (already selected), appoint auditors (very seldom changed or even criticized), etcetera.

But this needn’t be, if only shareholders would come out in person — AND ASK QUESTIONS. After all, it’s a once-a-year opportunity to get right down to the nitty gritty of these sometimes complex operations.

Most companies, by and large, welcome questions from the floor. Indeed many bring their senior operating staff down from the north to be on hand to answer any questions shareholders might have pertaining to the operation of which there must be many. To them, it must be disappointing to see so many empty seats or shareholders sitting on their hands. Don’t they care?

Oh for the days with the likes of a `One-Share Sweeney’ in attendance. Those were meetings that were always interesting. Indeed our reporters were always quick to volunteer the coverage of any meeting they suspected that Mr Sweeney was likely to attend. A dapper lawyer who made a business of attending meetings, he was usually anti-management. Always interesting, he could be counted on to ask crisp and penetrating questions. On this point he had no fears, yet he commanded respect. Indeed it was management that had the fears from the moment he walked in (invariably after the meeting had been called to order).

(We recall the president of one company being so embarrassed and nervous that he ordered subsequent meetings be held at the mine site, to which Mr One Share was less likely to drop in. On the other side of the coin, Mr Sweeney himself was the president and major shareholder of a junior mining company with a tse listing. His meeting was called for his office at 8.30 a.m. on a Saturday. He was so shocked when we walked in that he didn’t even have an extra chair on hand. In his case a quorum was but two — Mr Sweeney and his secretary).

Good questions invariably make a good meeting. But what is not needed is the likes of church groups or other do-gooder organizations monopolizing the question period, as at last year’s Falconbridge meeting, with a whole series of long and monotonous harangues on the evils of apartheid.

After all its your day, that of the real shareholder. Make the best of it.