Time to educate some of you as to what we're dealing with here.
Sadly this may go over the heads of those that don't understand corporate governance and the distinction between the roles of executive & non-executive directors.
When Syntonic makes an ASX announcement you'll usually find 2 email address at the bottom of it in case you have any queries regarding its contents - one is the IR address and the other is for the Investor Relations person (there are no phone numbers given). This is how they want all correspondence to happen.
If you have a corporate governance question how do you ask it ?
Well if your clever you might try phoning Syntonic's office in Australia and ask to speak to the company secretary regarding a corporate governance issue.
The receptionist's have however been instructed to refer all shareholders/callers to the Investor Relations person in the first instance (through email first of all) they might if pushed give out that telephone number (I already have it from long ago). They won't take my calls but they might take yours.
They'll ask you to put the issue in writing & will then forward it to the management team / executive directors for them to then pass it on to the non-executives. Yup that's right they won't send it directly to the non-exec's.
The company secretary doesn't have an email address of there own for Syntonic by the way (unbelievable).
So just to be clear for those that don't get it, the current procedure effectively means the executive directors get to see in advance anything to do with corporate governance & complaints about them coming in, before the non-executives have had a chance to even know about the issue let alone start an investigation on it.
Any alarm bells ringing yet ?
Even when issues have been identified etc the company secretary basically won't take your calls, the poor receptionist ends up being a relay service for me, to let them know you've sent in an email that they need to be aware of.
The non-executive directors to date have never taken a phone call or phoned me or written an email to me regarding the issues that I've raised.
They seem to think the current set-up is appropriate (talk about Foxes guarding the Hen hut).
Best practise would completely disagree with them.
I've been told on various occasions that changes have been implemented, lessons learned but there is no evidence to support this, the documents that used to be visible on the old website, never backed up those claims, because they never appeared to be updated.
The time for taking things at face value has gone. From now on there going to have to prove they've done it publicly end of story.
I use the subject heading to highlight who needs to see the email especially if its related to corporate governance issues and not just a more general query.
As I've said before I've never come across a company where the directors refuse to speak to shareholders/investors.
LOTM
SYT Price at posting:
0.4¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
