Guy Jubb provided an overview of what Annual General Meetings of the future should be premised on. In his view, the AGM is the missing piece that brings together all the actors who contribute to the Company’s long-term sustainable success into the same forum and onto the same stage in an ESG world of responsible capitalism.

Commenting on the shunning of the Deliveroo flotation by leading institutional investors because of corporate governance concerns, Alex Brummer drew attention to Guy Jubb’s intervention ‘at the annual meeting of the biggest beasts, including Shell, to expose governance breaches’ before he retired from Standard Life Investments and he encouraged todays fund managers to spend more time investigating governance breaches.

This blog, written jointly with Michael Kind and Lily Tomson, comments on recommendations by ShareAction to transform AGMs from staid, sparse, and perfunctory events, into a genuinely helpful arena for companies, investors, and stakeholders to address the challenges they collectively face. The writers urge their fellow investors, company representatives, stakeholders, and policymakers to grasp the nettle and rise to the challenge by taking steps to deliver their vision for the AGM of the future.

Guy Jubb made a keynote presentation about his stewardship experience at Standard Life Investments, and he then contributed to the ensuing Panel discussion about how stewardship codes could be implemented in India. He covered issues such as the compliant management of price-sensitive information and corporate governance health-warnings.

In his capacity as Chair of the ICAS Research Panel, Guy Jubb said the research team, led by Professor Giovanna Michelon, shone a light very specifically on accounting for the increasingly significant costs of decommissioning and clean-up operations in polluting industries. This is a complex aspect of accounting which is not generally well understood but as companies respond to environmental concerns it cannot be ignored.

Guy Jubb is mentioned, in his capacity as ‘a governance veteran and an independent non-executive of Mazars’, as being due to attend a meeting being convened by the FRC to discuss mounting concerns about operational separation of audit from non-audit services at leading accounting firms.

Guy Jubb argued that the pandemic had prompted an acceleration towards an enlightened stakeholder view where shareholders are on the same level as other stakeholders. He noted that whilst there had been a shift in this direction, it remained shareholders to whom boards are and should be accountable.

This article by Andrew Hill, the FT’s Management Editor, draws on a global webinar arranged in the early days of the pandemic by the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) of which Guy Jubb was the Chair at the time. He is quoted in the article, emphasising the importance of boards ensuring ‘they have the right modus operandi to handle future waves of this pandemic, or comparable global threats’. [Financial Times Paywall]