Investor group vows to grill Royal Bank bosses at annual meeting

REPRESENTATIVES from a high-profile investors’ group have declared they will grill Royal Bank of Scotland bosses over their refusal to establish a shareholder committee at the state-backed lender’s annual general meeting in Edinburgh today.

ShareSoc has been a vocal critic of Royal Bank’s rejection of its calls for greater investor influence at the institution, and yesterday it branded the bank’s refusal to set up a committee for shareholders as an “absurd obstruction of shareholder democracy”. It said more than 100 investors signed a requisition proposed by ShareSoc for an AGM resolusaid: tion requiring the bank to form a shareholder committee, which Royal Bank refused.

The bank, 73 per cent owned by UK taxpayers, has said that it supports increased shareholder but has been advised that the resolution proposing the vote was inconsistent with the law and its constitution.

ShareSoc has hit back at the bank’s stance, claiming that it runs counter to a suggestion from the UK Government that it could be a way of improving corporate governance. The investors’ group is calling for its members to vote against the two remuneration resolutions at today’s AGM at the bank’s headquarters at Gogarburn.

Earlier this week, Royal Bank was criticised by unions over plans to cut more than 250 tech staff and offshore dozens of jobs to India. The bank said it would redeploy affected staff into other roles where it could.