14 DAY TRIAL // Considering the results of the recent elections, it seems like Yahoo!'s board of directors got more credit from the investors than everyone expected. Most of the current executives were voted by at least 80% of the stockholders, which gave them a sense of security, but now things are not as bright as they seemed on August 1.
As we already reported, the Capital Research & Management investors expressed their conviction that the results that were disclosed after the annual meeting between stockholders and directors are not accurate, and it seems that they were right. Yahoo! released yesterday an erratum list, which shows some rather big differences between the outcome of the vote as it was previously announced and the real results.
Some of the most notable errors occurred in the case of Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang. At first, the positive votes accounted for 85.4% of the total, but after the recount, it turns out only 66,3% of the investors actually supported him, which means that the number of withheld votes doubled. Roy Bostock, Chairman of the Board, was backed up by only 60.4% of the investors, which is 20% less than it was previously reported. Other important differences can be seen in the cases of Ronald Burkle, Arthur Kern and Gary Wilson, each of them being attributed more votes than they actually got.
Broadridge Financial Solutions, the company that processed the Yahoo! vote results, admitted to have miscalculated the numbers. It was not a human error, as the company pointed out, but the failure of a counting system. "Specifically, as Broadridge publicly disclosed earlier today, when Broadridge reported voting results for "withholds", a truncation error occurred in reporting share numbers that exceeded eight digits." says Yahoo! in a press release.
The new results did not bring changes in the executive board, but emphasized the fact that investors are not very pleased with the situation. Because of that, the share value dropped from $33, as it was evaluated in May, when Microsoft placed a bid to acquire the entire company, to less than $20, as it is estimated today.