General Meetings FAQs
Most limited companies are required to hold an annual general meeting, or AGM of shareholders at which decisions are taken on the company’s business. The ‘ordinary’ business of the AGM is repeated every year and includes accepting the company’s accounts for the year and fixing the proportion of a company’s profits that will be paid back to shareholders as a dividend.
The company’s directors often take this opportunity to put forward other business requiring the agreement of shareholders.
There are other types of shareholder meeting, such as an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) that are called if there is urgent business requiring shareholder approval that cannot wait until the next AGM.
If you cannot go to the meeting yourself, you can appoint someone else to go in your place as your ‘proxy’. To do this, you must complete the proxy card that is sent to you with your notice of meeting and annual report and send it back to us 48 hours in advance of the meeting with the appropriate stamp duty paid. If a poll is taken on a resolution, your proxy can cast your vote for you but is not usually able to speak on your behalf.
If you cannot appoint a proxy to attend the meeting in person, you can still send the proxy form back to us and in the event of a poll on any resolution, the chairman will cast your vote for you in line with the instructions you give on the form.
We are currently seeking approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission to introduce online proxy voting, to enable shareholders send their proxy instruction over the web. If and when this service becomes available, details will be sent you with the information about the meeting.
DataMax Registrars Limited is offering shareholders the choice of receiving communications such as the notice of meeting electronically instead of post. To register a preference, you just need to register on our online web based services, which you can use to tell us your preferred option for company mailings: e-mail or post. You can change this anytime you log on to our online shareholder service.
You should make sure that your e-mail address on our online shareholder service is up to date. If we are unable to send your shareholder communications, such as notification of the meeting, because the address you have given us is not recognized, we will send you a paper copy by post within 48 hours.
When we start offering this facility, you will receive details with other information about the meeting.