Others here know that I am generally quite bullish on VUL and believe in remunerating company personnel appropriately. I will, however, need to look at Resolution 5 and it’s implications much more carefully before voting my shares in favour of it, and I recommend others do likewise over the next few weeks before rushing off to vote.
In particular, the termination benefits waiver part. There needs to be pretty compelling reasons imo to waive the Corporations Act statutory limits on what equity benefits an officer can take away from the business (above and beyond their own contributed capital of course) upon retirement or termination. Remembering that every company is uncertain of future value of benefits given, it’s not a VUL-specific issue. Section 4.3 of the explanatory statement covers this, and it’s all part and parcel of Resolution 5 which additionally renews the Employee incentive plan, adding 8.6 million shares to the giveaway basket.
Voting in favour of things now, when things are quiet and valuation is low and there’s still an enormous amount of new, necessarily incentivized staffing to come, as well as future board renewal, makes it very difficult to stop or object to simply outrageous payouts in the future. Worth some very careful consideration imo.
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