LTP News Sharing:
The president and CEO of proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) recently claimed that his firm’s advice is “apolitical” and “impartial.”
Scott Shepard
“This is just nonsense,” replies Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard.
In a commentary published by RealClearMarkets, Scott explains:
A lot of the responsibility for pushing corporations hard to the left in recent years lies with an until-recently little-known pair of proxy-advisory companies, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis. The profound partisan bias (as well as the profound conflicts) of these companies… has recently been highlighted by… the editors of the Wall Street Journal and the sensible members of the House Financial Services Committee’s subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
Once an obscure niche, shareholder proxy votes have become a major issue in recent years exactly because they have been used by the left to force companies away from their fiduciary duties and into taking the hard-left position on a whole series of issues, including equity-based discrimination, political-schedule decarbonization and bizarre and partisan social positions….
ISS and Glass Lewis have played a vital role in this process. They are a duopoly, controlling 97 percent of the proxy advisory market.
And despite the claims of neutrality from ISS CEO Gary Retelny, Scott demonstrates that Retelny’s “demonstration of non-partisanship really demonstrates that the score is
- ISS support of leftwing social and environmental shareholder proposals: 60 percent.
- ISS support of center/right social and environmental shareholder proposals: 0 percent.”
Read Scott’s entire commentary here.
Author: The National Center
