Governance and stewardship news

As the 2026 proxy season moves past its peak, this week’s AGMs reinforce familiar patterns. Shareholder discontent is evident across pay, climate and governance votes, but formal outcomes continue to diverge sharply from sentiment.

Under a new settlement with the DOJ, PayPal will launch a new Small Business Initiative that removes race and ethnicity as eligibility criteria.

If enacted, the change would materially shrink the final cohort due to enter Australia’s mandatory climate reporting regime, which has been rolling out in phases since 2025.

This week’s voting builds on themes that have featured consistently in Minerva’s proxy updates this season. Shareholder support for governance, remuneration and climate-related proposals remains resilient across multiple markets, but outcomes continue to be shaped by structural and procedural constraints. Supermajority voting requirements are again preventing reforms with majority backing, while the expanded use of SEC no-action relief is narrowing the range of proposals that reach the ballot, reinforcing a gap between investor sentiment and formal outcomes as peak season intensifies.

Follow This has issued a public letter, urging investors to support Resolution 23, which asks Shell’s board to explain how resilient its strategy would be in a scenario where the market for oil and gas contracts, rather than merely cycling through price volatility.

Minerva’s evidence shows that Europe continues to underperform on shareholder participation despite SRD II being fully in force.

The SEC’s move to unwind its climate disclosure rules may look like deregulation, but for companies and investors it risks replacing one contested standard with a longer period of uncertainty.

This week’s key votes highlights that governance frameworks are as important as the substance of proposals themselves, with voting outcomes impacted by supermajority voting thresholds, no-action exclusions and major shareholders.

The Parliament is pushing for a tougher SFDR labelling regime, sharpening the divide between labelled and unlabelled products, demanding clearer engagement strategies, and setting higher thresholds than the Commission’s original proposal.

Investors are shifting from supporting transactions to directly challenging boards, using pay votes and director opposition to enforce accountability as formal shareholder channels narrow.

System-level investing is pushing stewardship beyond company-level engagement towards safeguarding the health of the economic systems on which all portfolio returns ultimately depend.

State-level political pressure is increasingly poised to shape the boundaries of “acceptable” financial risk analysis in the US, with direct implications for the consistency and independence of credit ratings.

US political and legal pressure on DEI is creating a growing disconnect with investor expectations, forcing boards to navigate conflicting risks between regulatory exposure and shareholder governance norms.

An early snapshot of how investors are responding to the 2026 UK Stewardship Code is beginning to emerge just as another proxy season gets under way.

BP’s 2026 AGM should be understood first as the consequence of a mishandled governance issue, and only second as a response to activist campaigning.

This proxy update highlights key voting outcomes from the past few weeks of the 2026 proxy season and assesses key developments for the week ahead.