Santos board wins shareholder support

A campaign by activist shareholders to vote down the re-election of Santos chair Keith Spence fell flat at the company’s annual general meeting today.  

The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility had filed a motion to vote against the re-election of Mr Spence to chair the board at the gas producer.

The ACCR said Santos’s performance with Mr Spence at the helm had been substandard, claiming a growth strategy leading to a 150 per cent uptick in capital expenditure had generated a 7 per cent shareholder returns since 2021.

Shareholders had also faced pressure from environmental groups in the lead up to the vote, including environmentally focused trading platform Sustainable Investment Exchange, which called to vote the Santos chair out in a now-deleted post to its website.

The campaign came to little at today’s meeting, with Mr Spence – an oil and gas veteran who previously worked with Woodside – returned with more than 93 per cent of the shareholder vote.

New Curtin University chancellor Vanessa Guthrie was also returned to the Santos board with 91.65 per cent of the shareholder vote.

New directors John Lydon and Vickki McFadden were elected with little opposition.

The AGM came off the back of a tumultuous period for Santos, which was in and out of court for months through 2023 in a legal battle with native title holders over the stalled Barossa LNG project.

Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher told today’s meeting the company was now 70 per cent finished with the Barossa project’s development and on track for a 2025 production date.

The shareholder vote comes in the lead up to Woodside’s AGM on April 24, where the ACCR and Sustainable Investment Exchange are among the groups to call for a vote against company chair Richard Goyder.

The group claimed Woodside had not taken enough action on climate with Mr Goyder as chair.

The high-profile Mr Goyder, who stood down from his role at image-plagued airline Qantas last year, flagged his intent to go again as Woodside chair in March.

Mr Goyder’s re-election has divided major shareholder groups. Proxy adviser CGI Glass Lewis issued a report earlier this month recommending its clients oust Mr Goyder.

Institutional Shareholder Services has taken the opposite view in support of Mr Goyder, as has superannuation fund HESTA, which is understood to have voted against Mr Spence’s re-election at Santos today.  

Mr Goyder revealed in a video recorded for an energy transition briefing last month that Woodside’s executive remuneration would be more heavily weighted to its climate performance in the years ahead.

Santos and Woodside engaged in brief, early stage merger discussions late last year, but no deal was struck.