SBI online EGM experience ~ Shareholder Awareness Program

SBI online EGM experience.

state bank of India online virtual EGM held on 17th June 2020

Article published as on Thursday, 18^th June, 2020 at 10:00 a.m.

3:00 p.m. Wednesday, 17^th June 2020.

This was the EGM and the AGM is scheduled to be on 14^th July.

Agenda of meeting:

General meeting for election of shareholder directors under section 19 (c) of the SBI act, 1955.

To attend meeting one must login into NSDL website.

Approximately 2:00 p.m. the item appears under the e-voting section.

At 2:30 p.m. you can click on the option of online EGM and a new popup window opens.

Meeting concluded within 35 minutes.

The EGM begins.

Chairman Rajnish Kumar instructed on the conditions to vote,

Only shareholder holding 50 shares or more shares for a least 3 months prior to the EGM we eligible to cast their vote of the resolution, counting their vote as 1 vote.

Other details such as brief profiles of candidates were discussed, 4 are to be nominated out of the 5 contesting candidates.

Coming to question and answer session, the speakers queries:

First speaker: to and fro conversation (very bad audio quality)

Management: we cannot hear you.

Speaker: can you hear me now?

First speaker raised the concern regarding rights of small shareholder holding less than 50 shares not being allowed to vote.

And talked about law from SBI act 1955 and technicalities related to it.

Next speaker: voice was not clear.

Next speaker: raised same concern of now allowing people with less than 50 shares to vote.

Next speaker: had same query of 50 shares condition and how many people will not be eligible to vote on the resolution.

Many speakers were called out and were not present and those who were present had their voice breaking.

Answers to the queries: management did not answer why was such odd condition of 3 months and 50 shares was put and regarding number of people not eligible to vote was being ascertained by them.

Their answers truly did not provide any value addition to shareholders queries, and other questions such as profiles of candidates was already available in public domain.

section 19(A) of the SBI Act mentions criteria for shareholder director, part (B) and (C) states that they should be representing interest of depositors or of farmers, workers and artisans respectively.

With such conditions of 50 shares and criteria for election of such directors this makes it clear that these are not small shareholder directors, and even creates doubt whether they truly are shareholder directors ? or it is just the title given to them.

(State Bank Of India act regulation, 1955 includes the following
State Bank of India Act, 1955
State Bank of India General Regulations, 1955
State Bank of India General (Amendment) Regulations, 2013.

among these pursuant to regulation 31 of The state Bank Of India General regulation 1955, members are entitled to 1 vote for every 50 shares held by them.

Meeting concluded within 35 minutes.

Seems like Such AGM/EGM are being held just for compliance and formality, online meetings are aid to those who can’t reach out to venue and they should only be supplementary to physical meetings and not a substitute for the same.

My experience and inference:

· Video was shown of just 3 managerial personnel sitting in the hall, and no video of speaker shareholders. Leaving video aspect the audio quality was not good as hardly anything could be understood. There is need for improvement the experience.

· Concall of the companies have better audio than online conferencing through NSDL.

· Concall has its limitations, but online AGM/EGM being held are no good either.

· There was no need for OAVM (other audio visual mean) EGM. As the resolution could be passed by simple voting, and the management interaction was not any value addition.

· AGM could be held earlier and these items could be discussed along with other items, maybe management was on a trial run on how will the online AGM work out to be.

· For this year we may see only online AGM/EGM, but there is need for online as well as physical mode of AGM/EGM.

Scrutinizers report and result of the voting (clickhere)