Shareholders
of both Omnicom and Interpublic “overwhelmingly” approved Omnicom’s proposed acquisition of IPG Tuesday morning.
The votes took place at special meetings convened for each
shareholder group.
The precise tallies weren’t shared in the announcement, but later in the day and early Wednesday the firms filed separate vote totals with
the SEC.
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The separate filing with Omnicom's vote tallies showed that 93.2% of shares voted (155,510,386) were in favor of issuing additional company shares to complete the merger. Nearly
6.5% of shares voted were against issuing those shares. Abstentions totaled 481,631 shares. Total shares voted were 166,768,270.
The IPG filing reported that more than 99% of the IPG shares
cast, or 325,789,406 shares were in favor of the merger, versus 1,070, 178 against. Abstentions totaled 155,359 votes.
A separate non-binding advisory vote on a pay package for named executive
officers of IPG was much closer with 60.4% of shares (197,505,415) voted in favor and 39.5% (129,113,892) voted against. Abstentions totaled 377,626 shares.
Under the pay package, four IPG executives will receive a total of more than $80 million as
part of a so-called "Golden Parachute" agreement tied to Omnicom's acquisition of IPG.
The payments include $49 million to Interpublic CEO Philippe Krakowsky, $15.7 million to CFO Ellen
Johnson, $11.8 million to General Counsel Andrew Bonzani, and $6.2 million to Controller and Chief Accounting & Business Transformation Officer Christopher Carroll, according to an earlier
SEC filing.
The vote followed last week’s disclosure that the
Federal Trade Commission has made a second request for information related to its investigation into whether the merger passes anti-trust muster per the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.
The companies say they are
on track to complete the transaction in the second half of 2025.
Pictured above (l to r) are Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky. This story has been updated to
include the vote tallies for both groups of shareholders.