Snap investors to get no say on pay

Snap Inc. won’t be required to solicit the advice of shareholders on how much to pay its executives or to share some annual data with them, the company noted Thursday.

In an updated registration filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Snapchat maker more clearly pointed out some of the drawbacks of buying its stock. Snap plans to issue only nonvoting shares as part of an initial public offering in the coming weeks. And shares with no votes are not subject to federal proxy rules designed to give shareholders a say in corporate matters, Snap said.

That means Snap won’t be required to hold an advisory vote polling shareholders about executive pay packages. The say-on-pay policy was one of the top reforms passed after the late 2000s financial crisis.

Shareholders also wouldn’t be able to submit proposals at annual company meetings, though they at least would get an invitation to attend and ask questions.

Snap won’t have to file annual proxy statements containing data about its executives and board of directors. But some of the data may be included in other filings, and Snap said it would share any information with nonvoting shareholders that it provides to holders of voting shares.

Shareholders with votes would include co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy and the venture capital firms Benchmark Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The filing also showed that Snap is starting to hedge its reliance on Google for online storage. Snap, which already has a $2-billion agreement with Google, signed a $1billion agreement with rival Amazon Web Services.