Tokyo:
Toshiba shareholders on Friday rejected the reappointment of board chair Osamu Nagayama in a rebuke to management right after revelations of attempts to sway voting on activist investor proposals.
CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa mentioned shareholders had voted down a bid to reappoint Nagayama and a member of the firm’s audit committee.
It came regardless of Tsunakawa providing his backing for the chairman of the board, and pledging to work on reestablishing trust right after the damaging revelations of an independent probe.
Earlier this month, the inquiry discovered that the troubled industrial conglomerate “devised a plan to effectively prevent shareholders from exercising their shareholder proposal right and voting rights” at a meeting in July 2020.
The meeting, at which the activist shareholders’ resolutions have been rejected, was “not fairly managed”, concluded their 140-web page report.
It also detailed how Toshiba had pursued an intervention from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).
The probe was launched right after shareholders alleging vote irregularities pushed Toshiba to hold an extraordinary off-schedule common meeting in March.
Toshiba’s former CEO Nobuaki Kurumatani resigned in April right after a buyout offer you from a private equity fund with which he was related stirred additional turmoil inside the corporation.
Toshiba was as soon as a symbol of Japan’s sophisticated technologies and financial energy but has lurched from scandals and losses to a recovery in current years.
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