Every vote must be made to count

WHEN consumer goods giant Unilever announces its results next week, all eyes will be on the £4bn of profit it is likely to declare.

But Paul Myners, the fund manager-turned-City grandee, was more concerned last week with how quite so many votes went missing ahead of the company's last annual meeting.

Unilever was a rarity for actually bothering to contact its largest shareholders to check if they had voted. Alarmingly, though most said they had, one huge tranche of votes was not registered because a courier failed to deliver them on time, while another batch was lost by a so-called professional voting service.

It is simply unacceptable that the investment industry, which handles billions of pounds and which employs some of the brightest and most highly paid people, cannot manage to get votes to a company in time for an annual meeting.

The pipeline is exactly the same as the one used to handle rights issues, takeover bids and dividend payments - but, surprise surprise, slips-ups are much less frequent when there are large sums of money at stake.

Myners has spent the best part of three months wrestling with the problem on behalf of the Shareholder Voting Working Group and has come up with the answer. It is because votes are still cast physically, on bits of paper, that there is a large possibility of losing them.

Remarkably, only about half of our big companies have electronic voting systems. An even smaller proportion of fund managers have the option to vote on line. And though there have been two reports into the 'lost votes' fiasco, Myners was called in only after senior investment figures were given a pasting by the Treasury Select Committee and the Government starting muttering (again) about compulsory voting.

Yet the cost of getting rid of the tonnes of paper that are about to start clogging the streets as the annual meeting season gets underway is practically zero. For most companies, it involves little more than passing a resolution at the AGM to allow electronic voting.

Fund management margins may have been under pressure during the bear market, but it looks more than a little inconsistent for them to bang the drum about the importance of corporate governance if they are not willing to spend a few pounds installing processes that would guarantee that their voice, and that of the trustees they represent as owners of companies, was heard by the managers of those companies.

It is to be hoped that Myners will not have to implement his threat of 'naming and shaming' companies and investment firms that do not move as quickly as possible to introduce electronic voting.

For individual shareholders in collective investments - whose interests Myners hopes will not be prejudiced by his recommendations - the opportunity to vote remains pitifully limited.

Only broker Brewin Dolphin offers those holding shares in Peps and Isas the opportunity to vote online - for free. Others should copy swiftly.

M&S must get back to basics

CLEARLY overwhelmed by the challenge of selling things customers want to buy at a decent price, Marks & Spencer has hit on a new wheeze to drum up business.

The group is planning to offer work experience opportunities to the homeless, single parents, students and out-of-work MPs (well I made the last one up) in an attempt to brush up its credentials as a 'decent' member of corporate society.

The upper echelons at the company believe that by providing (unpaid) work for the disadvantaged, shoppers will get a rosy glow every time they see an M&S store and will pop in for a pair of knickers instead of walking straight past.

Drumming up business by being a 'good corporate citizen' has clearly worked for the Co-operative bank, about a third of whose new customers join because of its ethical investment stance.

But Co-op bank also has a good product. M&S would do far better to concentrate on getting its offerings right - particularly in its mainstream women's clothing business - rather than giving jobs to the underprivileged who won't even get the minimum wage.

Leighton's job list

WHEN Allan Leighton was called on to defend the appointment of James Murdoch at BSkyB, where he is a non-executive director, he made much of having had only a snatch of sleep after negotiating with unions at the Post Office, where he is chairman.

All that was happening while Leeds United, the football club where he used to be deputy chairman, was in financial crisis. Luckily, things were pretty quiet round at Bhs, where he is chairman, and at Lastminute.com, where he is also on the board, and at the couple of other companies where he is a director.

Now Leighton has popped up as deputy chairman of stores group Selfridges. This is not so much going plural as going bonkers.