Institutional Shareholder Services Inc.

And shockingly, we went to ballot on, uh, on this in Starbucks and Amazon and lost.

And that's partially because we had these proxy advisory firms like ISS and Glass Lewis a-advising clients to, to vote against our, um, our, our measures.

So- Anyway, this is a long story.

I didn't mean to, to get too far in the weeds here, but this is what I'm doing now, and this is sort of how it unfolded.

And you've got this weird situation where you have the BlackRock, State Street, Vanguards of the world, which, by the way, each of those has improved exponentially in the last few years.

So these aren't as bad as they were, but they are still incredibly powerful institutions.

And, uh, and they, in conjunction with proxy advisory firms like ISS and Glass Lewis, just exercise a, an astounding amount of control over corporate culture.

Now, fortunately, we are living in an era of pushback and correction, and so corporations are quickly walking back a lot of policies that they embraced wholeheartedly even three years ago.

Chair Paul O'Malley noted that distributions totaling $8.3 billion flowed back to shareholders, including a fully franked annual dividend of $5.05 per share.

Proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services questioned whether executives were being rewarded for carrying out standard job duties, noting that half of their near-term incentive pay was tied to performance targets that remained largely undisclosed.

ISS also contended that CBA's disclosure around bonus reductions applied to three senior executives, following compliance and risk management shortcomings left shareholders without enough detail to evaluate the penalties imposed.

CBA confirmed 1,827 staff misconduct cases over the most recent financial year, with 178 leading to employees leaving the organization.

However, yeah, so, you know, you're always going to run into that issue about personal agency and whose money is getting invested when you're dealing with public money.

But you're right to point out ISS and Glass-Lewis, you didn't name them, but the proxy advisory firms and the way they advise workers.

on voting and that is a highly political thing and people rely on them people firms big big firms because you know because there are so many companies out there that are pulled into let's just say we're talking a mutual fund rather than etf or whatever you can do etf there's so many it's hard to like know how to vote and all these things it's just like impossible to do all the calculations and follow all the corporations and do all that stuff So people have become dependent on these proxy advisory services to do it.

And these are two foreign firms, and their advisory lean, so to speak, is demonstrably left.

They reviewed over 2.5 million pages of non-public information.

They actually had to subpoena GFAN's series, As You Sow, Arjuna, Black Rock, State Street, Vanguard, ISS, and Glass-Lewis because they were not cooperative.

And they also interviewed several key players, and one of them was Mark Carney.

And the transcripts of the interviews are on the website.