The votes of General Meetings will have to be published

Today's Official Journal publishes a very important decree concerning the "rights of shareholders of listed companies". This decree issued by the Justice Minister and countersigned by the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister obliges companies to allot more space on their websites to notices of shareholders' general meetings and details thereof. Above all, from October onwards, it obliges them to publish the specific result of votes in General Meetings, thus ending the opacity criticised for so long by individual shareholders.

The text is worded as follows: "Companies whose shares are admitted to trading on a regulated market shall publish the result of votes at general meetings on the designated website within fifteen days of each meeting, including at least the following information: the number of shareholders present or represented at the meeting; the number of votes of the shareholders present or represented at the meeting; for each resolution, the total number of votes cast, including details of the number of shares and the proportion of the authorised share capital that they represent, the number and percentage of votes in favour of the resolution and the number and percentage of votes against the resolution, including abstentions.

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