The FSC Standard No. 13: Voting Policy, Voting Record and Disclosures requires member to formulate and maintain a voting policy which is accessible to scheme members.
Policy Statement
It is abrdn Australia Limited (abrdn) policy to endeavour to actively participate in all proxies for which our schemes are a shareholder. The documents below provide details of our proxy voting policy and proxy voting results.
abrdn invests for the clients’ portfolios in companies globally and actively target investment in those companies with sound corporate governance practices. abrdn committed to exercising responsible ownership with a conviction that companies adopting best practices in corporate governance will be more successful in their core activities and deliver enhanced returns to shareholders.
Our proxy voting records are available on our website
Our Policy on Voting and Voting Disclosures
We vote all shares globally for which we have voting authority. We make use of the services of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), which is a reputable provider of proxy voting research and voting recommendations. Although ISS has its own voting guidelines, we provide our own house guidelines to establish a custom policy, which ISS is required to follow when making voting recommendations. We also undertake our own analysis of resolutions being considered at AGMs and other shareholder meetings.
We implement considered policies based on our ESG Investment Guidelines when voting the shares we manage and seek to vote in a manner consistent with our clients and unitholders best interests. We generally support a board’s voting recommendation however, we do vote against resolutions which are not consistent with our clients and unitholders best interest. In the event that we vote against a resolution at a shareholder meeting, we use best endeavours to discuss this with the company beforehand and explain our reasons. We use reasonable endeavours to do so in respect of abstentions. We provide full transparency of our voting activity on our publicly available website.
Principles of stewardship and voting are incorporated in our Group stewardship code available on our website.
