Two high profile governance research firms disagree over how shareholders should vote their proxies at Walt Disney’s annual meeting set for Feb. 11. Institutional Shareholder Services endorses all of Disney’s board nominees, asserting that Disney has taken many positive steps in the past year subsequent to the highly charged shareholder vote at the 2004 meeting. Glass Lewis, however, recommends that shareholders withhold their votes for Chairman George Mitchell, citing conflict issues raised last year.
The overriding question, however, is whether investors even care what these two firms even think. “We do not pay much attention (to the reports),” insists a Disney analyst at an institutional firm that took a big position in the media company during the third quarter. “There are a lot of other things to look at.”
