Facebook has faced several scandals since the 2016 US presidential election, and four major shareholders of the social media giant have reportedly proposed removing Mark Zuckerberg from the company’s CEO position.
State treasurers from Illinois, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, which oversee pension funds, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer have filed the proposal, which is similar to a failed 2017 attempt to remove Zuckerberg from his leadership position, Reuters reported.
Rhode Island State Treasurer Seth Magaziner said that the proposal was still worth filing, although the 2017 attempt to remove Zuckerberg ended up being a mostly symbolic challenge, as a way of drawing attention to Facebook’s problems and how to solve them. The 2017 resolution was supported by at least three of the same public funds backing the latest proposal.
“This will allow us to force a conversation at the annual meeting, and from now until then in the court of public opinion,” Magaziner said.
The current proposal, which aims to influence Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting in May 2019, asks the board to create an independent board chair to oversee Facebook’s activities and improve shareholder oversight – a common practice at other companies.
The proposal also outlines the creation of a separate independent board chair in order to deal with the controversies like the ones that have rocked Facebook in the past few years, such as the unauthorized sharing of user information, the proliferation of fake news and alleged foreign meddling in US elections, which could damage the company’s reputation.
Such an independent chair may not have prevented the scandals that have plagued Facebook, yet “there might have been fewer of these problems and less of a drop in share price,” Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs said.
The 2017 resolution, which also called for the establishment of an independent chair, received support from the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund and Fidelity Contrafund – Facebook’s largest investors. But Facebook countered at the time that an independent chair could “cause uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency in board and management function and relations.”
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the proposal.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
