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Yahoo Investor Hires Auditor To Verify Voting Results

BoomTown author Kara Swisher reports that prior to last Friday's shareholder meeting, Capital Research & Management recommended that Yahoo withhold votes from CEO Jerry Yang and various other board members, including Chairman Roy Bostock, to underscore shareholders' disappointment with the board's handling of the company. Now, Swisher says, the investment fund has asked an independent auditor, Broadridge Financial Solutions, to investigate whether those votes were correctly counted on behalf of its Capital Research Global Investors fund, which collectively owns about 16% of Yahoo.

Even so, Swisher points out that Yang came away with 85.4% voting for him, while 79.5% supported Bostock, which means that most other shareholders voted for the pair, assuming that a large part of Capital Research's votes against them were counted. Actually, both Yang and Bostock fared better this year than last year, which is particularly unusual given how vocally unhappy shareholders have been with the company's management.

In response to Capital Research's hiring of another third party to tabulate the voting results, Yahoo said: "The independent inspector of elections certified the results of the election and Yahoo! accurately announced those results. Yahoo! did not participate in the execution of the votes and was not a party to any errors which may have been made either by a voting institution or a proxy processing intermediary acting on behalf of banks, brokers and institutions."

Read the whole story at D: All Things Digital »

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