Jul. 7, 2025
For reasons that are long established and obvious, closed-end investment funds should not be permitted to operate without regular annual meetings. Holding an incumbent manager accountable is hard enough with an annual meeting, given the lengths (legal and illegal) that advisers will go to preserve their contracts and their hand-selected "independent" directors. Managers have the choice to compete on merit or try to rig or close the polls. Given the emergence of illegal control share bylaws, poison pills, impossible quorum requirements, tilted election thresholds only applicable to challengers, and now the second round of the proposals to do away entirely with meetings, it is clear that the industry has no interest in the kind of healthy competition that otherwise fuels our economic system. Any proposal that weakens a shareholder's right to an annual meeting should be rejected.