Gouvernance d’entreprise à l’aune des AG 2021 : démocratie actionnariale, politique financière et diversité des conseils – Trois questions majeures

The Covid-19 health crisis has roughly hit companies, which have had to adapt, react, and adapt new practices while maintaining their short and long-term goals. During Annual General Assemblies, especially since these were largely held behind closed doors, the challenge of maintaining good exchanges and an acceptable level of shareholder democracy, if not perfect, was a major task that seemed to us have to draw our attention. The challenge that was not met in the same way, there is a gap between some of them who made efforts and others. Beyond the formal conditions, items discussed in GA were impacted by this exceptional situation: the arise of ethical imperative and the current economic situation evolves, such as the health environment, drove boards of directors to index their dividend and earnings strategies on these new demands. Moreover, these requirements switched on governance itself, mainly on claims about more diversity on boards as executive or non-executive. For many items, Covid has been a revealer or an accelerator and questions are still there. It is within this framework that we sought to analyze answers of companies to three major questions: the conditions of shareholder democracy, the evolution of financial governance decisions and ESG criteria and the diversity and quality of the functioning of boards. Using various academic sources, statistical elements but also company reports, their declarations, viewing of the GA. The scope corresponds to twelve companies listed on the CAC40