Bayer’s embattled CEO faces growing shareholder opposition

Bloomberg

Bayer AG is facing mounting opposition ahead of what’s shaping up to be its most contentious annual meeting in years, with influential shareholders faulting management for failing to foresee the risks of the company’s biggest deal ever.
A growing number of shareholders have said they won’t support executives and supervisory board members in a no-confidence vote at Friday’s annual meeting in Bonn, Germany. Though the vote has no legal weight, a low enough approval rating would throw into question the future
of Chief Executive Officer Werner Baumann and other leaders who orchestrated the $63 billion acquisition of US agriculture giant Monsanto.
Buying Monsanto was supposed to secure Bayer’s position in the rapidly cons- olidating agrochemicals market and deter outside forces from trying to split up the company, which sells everything from aspirin and other medicines to shoe inserts and soybean seeds. Instead, lawsuits linked to Monsanto’s contentious weedkiller Rou-ndup sparked the biggest and quickest loss of value in
the history of Germany’s
blue-chip DAX Index.
“In all good conscience, we can’t exculpate management if so much shareholder value is destroyed,” said Ingo Speich, chief of sustainability and corporate governance at Deka Investment, one of Bayer’s top-10 shareholders with a stake just shy of 1 percent. Deka will vote against discharging both Bayer’s management and supervisory boards for their actions last year, Speich said.
An approval rating below 80 percent would be “damaging to the reputation” of Bayer’s management, Speich said. “If you have 20 percent of shareholders against you, that’s a lot.”
The shares fell 1.4 percent in Frankfurt.