When Linde shareholders met for the virtual annual general meeting last year, it was a quick affair.
After 22 minutes and only three shareholder questions answered, the agenda was processed and the meeting was over.
A new negative record for a Dax company.
Whether the shareholders will have more to say this year will be shown this Monday at the Annual General Meeting.
Tillmann Neuscheler
Editor in business.
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Last year's Ruckzuck event was certainly also due to the fact that Linde has its legal seat in Dublin after the merger with Praxair and that general meetings in the Anglo-Saxon world are generally much shorter than in Germany. Nevertheless, the case has fueled the debate about the future of the virtual general meeting.
The second annual general meeting season of the 30 DAX companies, which is characterized by pandemics, is drawing to a close.
How it should go on in the long term is not clear.
The Corona emergency rule for the virtual assembly expires at the end of the year, it cannot be extended again - as last year - by decree by the government.
That would require a new law this time.
If nothing happens in the coming months, the old regulation will apply again at the turn of the year: And it provides for a requirement to be present at general meetings.
According to the old legal situation, online elements are possibly additional, and only if the format is provided for in the company's articles of association.
Just reading manuscripts
But only a few want to go completely back to the old days with pure face-to-face events. The German Association for Protection of Securities Holdings (DSW) could make friends with this. Its general manager Marc Tüngler found the course of the Linde general meeting "simply unworthy", he longs for face-to-face meetings as the normal format. About the purely virtual general meetings of the past two years, he said weeks ago that they were “boring as never before”.
For just reading manuscripts of speeches, the board members could have engaged a Tagesschau spokesperson, blasphemed Tüngler.
In fact, most of the virtual meetings were rather filmed face-to-face formats; there wasn't much that was innovative.
What particularly bothered Tüngler about the Corona Emergency Act was the restriction of shareholders' rights: for example, the obligation to submit questions beforehand, with the result of smoothly ironed answers.
Mixed form between presence and online
Many companies and shareholders, however, no longer consider meetings in person to be appropriate. You can shop and bank online, why shouldn't you be able to take part in a general meeting online? Many advocate a hybrid form between presence and online in the future. Some companies have even found the purely virtual version surprisingly fun, as it saves them money because no halls have to be rented and no catering for small shareholders has to be paid for.
Some top managers certainly liked the tightly conducted online general meeting because they did not have to endure the speeches of unruly shareholders for hours. In the second Corona year, the shareholders had a little more to say online than in the first, they were allowed to send videos, but they were limited to a few minutes. Some managers argue that a hybrid model is permanently too expensive and that if you have to decide, online is the more modern form.
So what will the general meetings look like from 2022? If a relapse into the old rules is to be avoided, something must happen quickly. But that is unlikely because of the general election at the end of September. Legislation is usually largely inactive in the weeks before and after a federal election. The time is inconvenient, according to the Federal Ministry of Justice. “The colleagues are working on it,” said a spokeswoman when asked, but of course no one knows today which regulation the newly elected federal government would like.