[ad_1]
Toshiba will return to the top section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange next week, after more than three years as a minnow giant in its second tier and under near constant pressure from activist shareholders.
The company’s long-awaited readmission means it will join groups like Sony, Hitachi and more than 2,000 others in the Topix index of leading stocks in the country.
Despite the promotion, Toshiba remains embroiled in an investor revolt led by two of its major shareholders. In December, he received requests from two activist funds – Singapore-based Effissimo and US-based Farallon Capital – for special shareholder meetings.
Simultaneous demands, unprecedented in Japan, and to which Toshiba has taken the first steps to respond, call on the company to do more to explain its plans for overseas acquisitions and to investigate the circumstances surrounding the annual meeting of shareholders last year, where General Manager Nobuaki Kurumatani survived an approval vote.
Although Toshiba has announced that it will host the EGMs as a combined event before the end of April, Effissimo last week raised a petition with the Tokyo District Court seeking approval of the convening of the ‘AGE itself. It is a right that it holds under Japanese law and is pressuring Toshiba to organize the EGM more quickly.
Toshiba’s readmission to the highest level on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from January 29 follows an extremely difficult time for the company that began with the revelation of a huge profit-boosting scandal in 2015.
The company was given a record fine and then plunged into another crisis due to the failure of its US nuclear business. He ended his fiscal year in March 2017 with more debt than assets and the stock market demotion was an automatic punishment.
At the time, many investors and analysts believed the situation was bad enough to warrant a full delisting. The decision not to do so has been widely interpreted as a sign of the government’s tacit support for the company.
Toshiba’s efforts to fill the financial vacuum left by the failure of the nuclear business involved the sale of a number of assets of what remains, even today, a large portfolio of subsidiaries.
The largest sale of its Crown Jewels memory chip business to a consortium led by Bain Capital. Other measures included a $ 5.4 billion issue of new shares, a move that put a large number of foreign funds and activists on its shareholder register.
In a written statement, Toshiba said it has reformed its governance and internal control systems and made efforts to “transform corporate culture”.
Source link
