The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is critical of the protest vote being urged by RiskMetrics at ASX’s upcoming Annual General Meeting because it is at odds with the recent finding of the Government regulator.
Last month, 14 August 2008, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) published its annual assessment of ASX's compliance with its obligations to provide fair, orderly and transparent markets. For the sixth consecutive year, ASIC gave ASX a clean bill of supervisory health, concluding that ASX is adequately supervising the market, and managing any conflicts between its commercial and supervisory operations.
ASX also believes RiskMetrics’ recommendation to vote against incumbent ASX director, Russell Aboud, “simply because he is the first of the incumbents listed on the proxy form” is ill-considered.
The ASX Board unanimously recommends the re-election of Russell Aboud because of his expertise, judgement and experience in the financial services and securities industries, as detailed in the Notice of Meeting to ASX shareholders.
The Notice of Meeting is available here: http://www.asx.com.au/about/pdf/notice_agm_26aug08_proxy.pdf