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The candidates elected, in alphabetic order,
were Marks, Mitchell, O'Sullivan, and Wilson.
By analysing the election statements of all the
candidates in the light of the election results, one can see a high correlation
between being concerned about the past behaviour of IBM/Trust and being elected.
This implies that similar concerns are prevalent amongst the electorate.
In Newsletter 12 it was pointed out that
Enron etc had made concerns about overprivileged corporations and greed-driven
executives a mainstream viewpoint, when previously the people highlighting such
concerns could be more easily attacked as a misguided minority.
In a similar way, this election result suggests a widespread loss of trust and
confidence amongst scheme members. If you consider the financial engineering
under Mr Gerstner an abuse, and the results of IBM's influence on the Trust
unethical, then you are not alone. Of course it would be wrong to label
those who believe everything was perfect as a complacent few - just as wrong as
labelling the complainants as a disgruntled extreme; the reality is likely to be
in the middle ground.
The affect of AMIPP's endorsement of certain candidates is not entirely clear,
in part because the detailed voting results are not made public. (It is
understandable that the rankings are not published since all those elected are
equals once elected.)
It is possible the results exactly matched the order of AMIPP's endorsements for
the top four positions (before rules about maximum electeds in each category
were applied). This would indicate that co-ordination had a strong effect.
However the mailing of the AMIPP website address into thousands of homes that
had not previously heard of it produced only a flurry of a few hundred new
registrations for the AMIPP Newsletter. The registrees still only amount to
about a tenth of the electorate. So the correlation of success with AMIPP
endorsement may not be due to coordination as much as to a general empathy with
the endorsed candidates' thinking. In this respect the performance of
Gavin Wilson is noteworthy - he displaced an
industrious re-standing trustee, without the advantage of AMIPP endorsement. (He
may have gained something from being the only non-endorsed candidate to make use
of the AMIPP message board.)
The topmost of the AMIPP objectives is to restore
trust and confidence amongst the scheme members. Although it remains possible
for IBM appointed trustees to outvote and ignore the elected trustees, this
election result suggests that the electorate is looking for change that promotes
AMIPP objectives.
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