South Korea’s state-run pension fund actively exercised its voting rights last year with its number of dissenting votes edging up, data showed Saturday.
Data from the National Pension Service (NPS), the operator of the fund, showed it voted against 10 percent of 2,836 resolutions last year at shareholders meetings of the companies it invested in, a 1.1 percentage point rise from a year earlier.
The fund had been casting more opposing votes in the past few years, the no votes accounting for 6.6 percent in 2009, 8.1 percent in 2010 and 7.0 percent in 2011. In 2012, the comparable figure was 17 percent but fell to 10.8 percent in 2013, the data showed.
The dissenting votes were mostly on the re-election of executives for board members and auditors, according to the data.
The NPS is South Korea’s largest institutional investor and holds a major stake in many blue chip Korean companies.
The fund operator has been increasingly under pressure to help rein in malpractices at major firms it invests in, and its role increased in voting against the re-election of chiefs of family-run conglomerates to company boards.
President Park Geun-hye has been seeking to overhaul the corporate governance structure and stressed the need to bolster the national pension fund’s voting right.
The NPS’ shareholding list is expected to grow with its increasing assets, and its existing equity portfolios will likely expand as the pension fund seeks to raise investment, which would give the pension fund a greater say in corporate management.
In 2013, the parliament passed a revised bill that allows the NPS to raise its stake in firms more.
The NPS’s investment reached 511 trillion won ($437 billion) at the end of last year. The figure includes 94.9 trillion won worth of local stocks, 69.9 trillion won for overseas stocks and 268.6 trillion won in domestic bonds.
(Yonhap)
