In late January 2018, MSCI reopened a consultation with the investment community on the treatment of unequal voting structures. Under the MSCI's proposal, the weights of shares with unequal voting rights in the MSCI Equity Indexes would be adjusted to reflect company level listed voting power in addition to free float. MSCI also released a discussion paper examining the theoretical and practical issues of the application of the "one share, one vote" principle. MSCI's proposal follows the recent decisions of stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Singapore to allow dual-class voting structures in the face of increasing competition among exchanges to list companies. In contrast, in July and August 2017, S&P Dow Jones Indices and FTSE Russell excluded from some of their indices companies that have multiple voting classes.
Feedback on the MSCI's proposal may be submitted on or before May 31, 2018 and MSCI will announce the results of the consultation on or before June 21, 2018. In the meantime, MSCI will continue to apply the temporary treatment of unequal voting structures until further notice, which does not affect any current index constituents (for more information on the temporary treatment, see our prior blog post available here).
A copy of the discussion paper is available here.
Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.
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