Intro to SIF Campaign

The Campaign to Protect Shareholder Rights

Leaders:

Social Investment Forum (SIF)
CERES
Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR)

These three powerful organizations with long track records of success in shareholder activism and advocacy have joined forces to “protect the rights” of shareholders concerned about proposed Rule 14a-.  As many as 500 institutions and financial professionals may join this campaign in the coming days – they represent literally trillions’ of dollars in corporate equity investment.

Individual investors are also being invited to submit letters to the SEC, members of the US House of Representatives and US Senate, and to journalists.  Separately, institutional investors are being invited to directly contact CEOs, board members, corporate secretaries and others [they deal with] at companies the institutions invest in to urge corporate officers to “respect shareowner rights” as they (the companies) respond to the SEC, lobby for certain positions on the competing proposals or act through their trade organizations. (Letters from institutions are en route to corporate suites.)

“This is a defining moment in future relations between companies and their investors,” the letters state – and the stakes are high for corporate managers and boards in their relationships with activist institutional investors who are promising a bigger and louder effort to protect shareholder rights than the SIF/ICCR campaign of 1997-1998, when investors opposed an earlier SEC plan to “gut the shareholder resolution process…” (That proposal was withdrawn; the debate has gone on now for 10 years!)

The Accountability Central Editors

Special Web Link: Save Shareholder Rights -A Joint Initiative of the Social Investment Forum and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

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