Rupert Murdoch faces shareholder revolt at News Corp annual meeting

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4. News Corporation Shareholders Meeting: Much Ado Might Not Add Up to Much

News Corporation will be holding its annual meeting Tuesday on the Fox studio lot in Los Angeles and there will be several efforts by large shareholders to diminish Murdoch family control, citing the hacking scandal in England.

But efforts to use the scandal to loosen the Murdochs’ grip on the company will likely fail for several reasons: First and foremost, Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, has delivered financial results for shareholders, with shares rising 44 percent in the last year, in part due to a $5 billion stock buyback that Mr. Murdoch once resisted.

And even if the business results weren’t remarkable, there isn’t a great deal that unhappy shareholders could do about it. Even though the family owns 13 percent of the equity in the company, it controls 40 percent of the voting stock. In addition, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor and a strong supporter of the Murdochs, owns seven percent of the voting stock. So substantive changes are unlikely to take place.

But that doesn’t mean that everyone will go along quietly. Both CalPERS and CalSTRS, two large California pension funds, have publicly stated that they will be voting against the re-election of Mr. Murdoch and his two sons, Lachlan and James, to the board of the media company; they were joined in that effort by the fund managers Hermes and Legal & General. And the Christian Brothers Investment Services has offered a shareholder resolution calling for Mr. Murdoch to give up his chairmanship of the board.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/news-corporation-shareholders-meeting-much-ado-might-not-add-up-to-much/