Glencore Xstrata shareholders sweep the deck clean – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – May 17, 2013)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

ROME — A vicious boardroom cull at Glencore Xstrata PLC, the world’s fourth-largest mining company, simultaneously ended the career of one of Britain’s most famous directors and revived the career of one of its most infamous.

At the newly formed company’s first annual general meeting, in Switzerland, a shareholder vote sent chairman Sir John Bond packing.

He was replaced on an interim basis by Tony Hayward, the deputy chairman whose career as chief executive officer of BP PLC was wrecked in 2010, when he took the fall for the disastrous Macondo oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, also known as the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Sir John’s ouster was the result of his support for an extraordinarily lavish executive pay package for the senior executives of Xstrata, among them former CEO Mick Davis. The Anglo-Swiss mining company officially merged with Glencore only last week to create a mining and trading giant with a market value of £44-billion ($68.4-billion) and deep links to Canada, where it owns grain handler Viterra Inc. and nickel miner Falconbridge Ltd.

The shareholder revolt marks a rare defeat for one of the Britain’s best-known and most successful executives. Sir John spent most of his career at HSBC as CEO and, later, chairman, and was knighted in 1999 for his services to banking. He was also chairman of Vodafone, one of the world’s biggest mobile communications companies.

Sir John knew the shareholders’ vote would go against him and the other directors of Xstrata who had joined the board of Glencore Xstrata. The proxy votes that trickled in Wednesday, a day ahead of the shareholders meeting, were overwhelmingly in favour of his removal. In the end, more than 80 per cent of the votes went against him.

Three Xstrata directors who had joined the Glencore board also got swept away. Yet another resigned ahead of the meeting, raising the Xstrata directors’ kill-off to five and essentially handing Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg full control of the enlarged company.

Sir John opened the meeting by telling shareholders, “I will not be re-elected as your chairman. Therefore the right thing for me to do is pass the chair to Tony Hayward, who is the senior independent director and deputy chairman and I will do that now.”

The appointment of Mr. Hayward, 55, as interim chairman thrusts the oil executive back onto the global stage after three years of relative obscurity. He became CEO of BP in 2007 after his predecessor, Lord John Browne, resigned.

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