Evelyn Y. Davis, shareholder activist, addresses students Tuesday morning at Horchow Hall at the School of Management at Yale University.
NEW HAVEN — This is a busy time of year for Evelyn Y. Davis.
The nationally known shareholder advocate owns stock in 80 corporations and each year, around this time, attends the annual meetings of about 30 of those companies. But in the midst of annual meeting season, she took time out Tuesday to visit Yale University to discuss the recent misdeeds of some corporate power players and tout the importance of individual shareholders making their voices heard.
For Davis, this is the most exciting annual meeting season in years, she said. A shareholder since 1960, she has garnered a reputation for grilling corporate leaders about issues such as executive compensation, but this year has set her sights on some new topics.
Last week at Bank of America’s annual meeting, for example, Davis questioned officials about their decision to take over troubled mortgage lender Countrywide Financial.
“What’s very important, in a bank in particular, is perception and image,” she said Tuesday during a talk at Horchow Hall organized by Yale’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance.
Worried that Countrywide’s marred reputation and extensive financial woes would hurt
Bank of America, she said she warned BoA Chairman, President and CEO Kenneth D. Lewis at last week’s meeting, “Countrywide is like an iceberg, you’ve only seen the tip.”
Unlike institutional investors, which tend to have a single issue they focus on, Davis said individual shareholders like herself are an important part of the corporate governance process because they keep executives on their toes and pay attention to a broad range of topics.
“That’s where your power is,” she said, adding that, although she sometimes submits formal resolutions to be considered at shareholder meetings, often she does not let on beforehand what questions she plans to ask. “That’s why I have so much power, because I’m a loose cannon.”
Davis is the founder and editor of Highlights and Lowlights, a newsletter that covers a variety of corporate governance topics. She also is founder of the Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation, which donates grant money to universities, arts organizations and hospitals.
Ira Millstein, senior associate dean for corporate governance at Yale and the namesake of the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance, said Davis is a revolutionary figure.
“Traditionally (individual shareholders) have been quiet,” he said. “Largely, these individual interests are unheard and that’s a shame. Evelyn bucked that trend. She started the process of raising hell at the annual meeting.”
Among the resolutions she has offered to companies, Davis recently requested that all shareholders be able to receive paper stock certificates instead of receiving them online, which is a recent trend, since she worried about hackers and felt it was unfair to mandate that shareholders use the Internet.
In light of her request, companies, including the former Federated Department Stores Inc., which is now Macy’s Inc., and AT&T Inc., make paper certificates available to all shareholders. |
