Exxon Mobil Shareholder Sues Board Over Automatic Voting Program

Exxon Mobil Corp.‘s optional program to automatically align individual investors’ votes with the board’s violates federal law, a proposed class action said.

Board members enacted this retail investor voting program as a “blatant power grab,” a pension fund told the US District Court for the District of New Jersey. Through it, they “seek to weaponize retail shareholder apathy by sock-puppeting retail shareholders’ voting discretion without providing the required disclosures under federal law, in order to crush the voting impact of security holders who read the proxy statements, participate in shareholder democracy, and legally vote their shares,” said the complaint ...