“We have received an email from PIRC (as shareholder) requesting a copy of all current executive directors’ service contracts and the Chairman’s letter of appointment under s229 of the Companies Act, “with a view to increasing dialogue with companies outside the AGM season”. The email states that other companies have already provided this information on request and did so via email and a pdf attachment.
As the requirement only seems to extend to inspection at the registered office, we are hesitant about emailing such documents. Have other companies had similar requests and if so how have they responded?”
We have received this request in the past but not recently. We have provided hard copies at no charge.
Do take the time to check whether they are a shareholder – they had claimed that they held a share with us but were not on our register and could not supply details when asked to provide the shareholder account details!
It was quite satisfying to respond that due to the nature of their work and owing to the fact that we encouraged transparency we were happy to provide the information and at no cost – but next time please just ask and don’t do it under the guise of being a shareholder when this is not the case.
We heard nothing back.
We have not been asked as yet but will be watching out for the request now.
We sent the contracts to them in hard copy form last time and never received any feedback or comment at all.
I suspect this is another fishing expedition.
I haven’t received a request yet but if I do I shall respond in the same way as last time.
I received exactly the same request as this previously and sent them a pdf of the service contracts at no charge. I took the view that to charge them would seem somewhat petty and as summaries of the contracts are on our website we were not really giving them any more information than they could otherwise get (and as a shareholder they would be entitled to). PIRC will write whatever they want to about a company but I have found that it is better to be cooperative (within reason) and engage in dialogue with them then you can sometimes get them to listen to reason (although never around ratio of audit to non-audit fees on which subject they are entrenched).