Juventus 2016 shareholders’ meeting – An increasing amount of institutional investors are participating in the Juventus shareholders’ meeting. According to the minutes of the last meeting on 25th October, 13% of Juventus’ share capital is made up of shares held by pension funds, investment funds and other financial institutions. This percentage is increasing, given that institutional investors made up around 9% of the shares in 2015 and around 7% in 2014.
The minutes also reveal that Loredana Fedele represented all the institutional investors who registered to vote at the general meeting in Turin. The lawyer acted as proxy for around 131,925,226 shares (around 13% of Juventus’ total share capital, which is made up of 1,007,766,600 shares).
The composition of this 13% shareholding is complex. The biggest portion belongs to the English private equity fund Lindsell Train, who – with a shareholding of around 10% – are Juve’s second biggest shareholder behind Exor (63.8%), which is owned by the Agnelli and Elkann families.
However the minutes also show that Lindsell Train’s deposited shares at the meeting, which were split into three tranches, comprised just 7.38% of the total shareholding.
This doesn’t mean that part of the 10% shareholding which was declared to Consob (and confirmed in the Register of Shareholders at the start of the assembly) has been sold, but instead that they just may not have been deposited to vote at the meeting.
There are other big companies whose stakes in the share capital are sizeable, but which fall under the 2% threshold required to participate at the meeting. These include the RBS Group Pension Fund, the pension fund of the Royal Bank of Scotland – a leading European financial institution and the owners of 1.44% of Juventus.
Fedex Employees Pension Trust, the pension fund for employees of the well-known delivery company, is also among Juventus’ major shareholders with 10,000,000 shares, equivalent to 1% of the share capital of the Andrea Agnelli-owned club.
The minutes of the meeting also show that around half of the institutional investors present at the Juventus Stadium voted against the motion concerning the remuneration of the board of directors (click here for the analysis of CEO Beppe Marotta’s salary).
However, the votes of 72.92% of the ordinary share capital represented at the assembly were in favour, among which was the 63.8% in the hands of Exor and the 7.38% deposited at the assembly by Lindsell Train.
