Resource News
Don Argus’s finale turns into a Q&A marathon
By resourceINTEL · November 27, 2009 · 9:15 am · Leave a Comment
RETIRING BHP Billiton chairman Don Argus should probably have received a rousing send-off from his home state shareholders yesterday at his last annual general meeting following a decade running the board of the nation’s biggest company.
But a stream of questions and comments from anti-nuclear campaigners, Colombian trade unions, indigenous groups and others — given their one chance a year to complain directly to the board — stretched the meeting to four hours.
And by that time, few of the 500 people who had showed up to Mr Argus’s final AGM were left.
“It’s been an outstanding highlight of my life and it’s been an extraordinary privilege,” Mr Argus said at the end of his last meeting, which was fittingly held in Brisbane.
Its importance to the respected businessman was evident from an early vow he made to anti-uranium campaigners’ relentless questioning despite instructions to save them for later.
“You’re not going to hijack my last meeting, I can assure you,” Mr Argus told them.
Most of the concerns raised during the meeting were related to the Olympic Dam expansion and the proposed Yeelirrie mine in Western Australia and BHP’s involvement in the uranium industry.
After the meeting, Mr Argus, who said he would step down early next year when chairman-elect Jacques Nasser was ready to take the reins, was reluctant to give an indication of his plans after retirement.
One win for Mr Argus at the meeting was that his repeated recent attempts to explain the company’s remuneration accounting, and a 51 per cent gain in chief executive Marius Kloppers’ total remuneration despite him actually not getting paid more, received support from the Australian Shareholders Association.
At the meeting, an ASA representative said the group normally voted against remuneration reports, but it was backing BHP’s. One shareholder was concerned the AGM was on the first day of the opening day of the first cricket Test match of the summer, as Australian faced the West Indies down the road. “All I can say is Don knows how to strategically plan AGMs around cricket matches,” Mr Nasser replied of Mr Argus, a former Queensland schoolboy cricketer who was headed to the Gabba to watch day two today. “Please hang on to your shares because I am confident about the future of the company,” were Mr Argus’s final AGM words…read more at The Australian
