Buhlmann's Corner

Europe goes green

Looking at the growing library of “green books”, you might think spring is promising a better future. But if you make the effort to read more than just headlines and Green Paper titles, you’ll see that Green Papers are so called not because green is the color of hope, but because they are written at the drawing board – the relation between practice and real life is almost completely missing.

If you find an interesting bit, then the content is not new – in 1977 (at that time still as SdK, shareholder association Schutzgemeinschaft der Kleinaktionäre) I wrote an opinion for the Bonn government that auditors should operate under the same responsibility not for 100 years, but a maximum of five to ten.

All this hardly helps to create shareholder will. Because it is still not shareholders but self-appointed mood setters that are responsible for the voting majorities in European shareholder meetings. The whole thing is alienated still further by the voting techniques and the chains of depositaries, which are more mysterious than transparent. Precisely for this reason it can and must be considered a success for VIP’s counter-motion at RWE to have been supported by an almost 30 percent share of the AGM.

The real aim of such Green Papers should be to force shareholders or their trustees to a documented opinion of their own. The investors, the so-called beneficials, should be trained to interrogate their managers of pension assets and investment capital about what opinion, if any, they have. Not just their green opinion, but also their ethical and economic opinion. It would be a success if there were not just calls for Camelot, but if a democratic King Arthur were in fact called to voting representation.

Is it really necessary that stock voting rights are observed only at home? That voting rights are treated as responsible only if it is so prescribed by law, and that even a single border crossing in the not yet grown together Europe means the end of any shareholder democracy? Shareholder democracy is not decided by quotas in company bodies nor by dividend amount. Shareholder democracy without the people and their agents is simply bloodless.