Following the news that Manchester United's owners, the Glazer family, plan to float a 30% stake in the club on the Singapore Stock Exchange Mark Goyder adresses the complex issues surrounding shareholder voting rights and their implications for stewardship.  

In this article Tomorrow’s Company Founder Director Mark Goyder sets out why we customers can no longer take a passive role in the investment process and why it is essential that we hold to account the actions of those who invest our money.    

In 2008 Tomorrows Company published “Tomorrow’s Owners – stewardship of Tomorrow’s Company”. This was a review of the principles of good ownership from private equity and family business to institutional investment in listed companies. The report concluded that shareholders had four roles – being a member, a provider of finance, a trader of shares and a steward, but that in listed companies it was this fourth role that was being neglected. The publication of this report coincided with the failure of the banks in October 2008. Sir David Walker picked up the theme of stewardship in his 2009 report for the UK government on the governance of banks and other financial institutions. Here we set out Tomorrow’s Company’s definition of stewardship and the four principles that make up effective stewardship.    

I've listened carefully to the discussions of the past two days and tried to formulate these remarks as late as possible. Let me suggest four concrete action points which reflect Commissioner Andor's commitment to what he called 'a new and modern EU CSR policy framework'.

Tomorrow’s Company is currently developing a stewardship scorecard to apply to all company boards and shareholders. This is in response to the widespread concern that too many companies – including our banks – failed because of an absence of shareholder engagement and risk management by the directors.As part of this we have developed and applied our own Premiership Stewardship scorecard for clubs currently in the Premiership which you can see in this article.