<\/p>\n
This Oct. 26, 2006, file photo, shows an Exxon logo seen at a Dallas gas station.\u00a0(AP Photo\/LM Otero, File)<\/p>\n
AP<\/p>\n
Exxon Mobil will likely redomicile in Texas<\/a> after a proposal to do so passed a shareholder vote, according to a preliminary count of the votes.<\/p>\n In March, the Houston area oil and gas giant announced its board unanimously recommended moving Exxon Mobil\u2019s corporate charter <\/a>from New Jersey to Texas, and at Wednesday\u2019s shareholder meeting, the proposal passed preliminarily with a little over 70% of the vote. Full tabulation is not expected to change the outcome of the proposal.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n While Exxon Mobil isn\u2019t leaving Delaware, the company\u2019s proposal contributed to a nationwide conversation around \u201cDexit\u201d: the burgeoning trend of redomestications that Texas wants in on. Notably, Exxon Mobil engaged in public disputes with opponents of the proposal, including the major proxy advisories ISS and Glass Lewis and the New York City Comptroller, in the lead-up to its shareholder meeting Wednesday.<\/p>\n Exxon Mobil\u2019s New Jersey charter is an artifact of when Standard Oil was first incorporated in 1882, when the Garden State was the hot spot for incorporations. Eventually, changes to New Jersey\u2019s corporate code, beginning in 1910, made the state less business-friendly and companies moved en masse to Delaware, which has been the incorporations leader ever since.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware, giving them access to its preeminent Chancery Court, and other states, including New Jersey, often defer to Delaware precedent in matters of corporate law.<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Exxon Mobil is one of the 20 largest public companies in the world by market capitalization, worth about $614 billion.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Texas has sought to challenge Delaware for incorporations with its own corporate law infrastructure, beginning with the formation of the Texas Business Court, then a slate of bills in the Legislature to give it a head start. Several companies have already made the jump, including Tesla and SpaceX, Coinbase <\/a>and Dillard’s, and Dell has filed to do so<\/a>, but proposals are not guaranteed to pass.<\/p>\n Dallas-bank Texas Capital had a similar proposal to leave Delaware that failed<\/a>, while several of the other public companies that have redomiciled haven\u2019t depended on a broad investor base approving their proposal thanks to multi-class share structures and voting power concentrated in a few powerful shareholders.\u00a0<\/p>\n Opposing the opponents<\/p>\n Glass Lewis and ISS are two firms that provide third-party analysis on public companies\u2019 votable items, providing recommendations for investors who may not be tuned in to the day-to-day of a company, but they have been criticized for their outsized influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n While the proxy advisories\u2019 recommendations are not usually made public, Exxon Mobil issued public responses to both that indicate both Glass Lewis and ISS recommended votes against redomiciling in Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n Exxon Mobil\u2019s responses suggest the proxy advisories felt that redomiciling in Texas could diminish shareholder rights, with emphasis on the possibility that ExxonMobil may one day opt into Texas laws that allow companies to set high ownership thresholds for shareholder proposals and derivative suits.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the responses, Exxon Mobil characterized this as \u201cscaremongering,\u201d and emphasized that its redomiciliation proposal expressly opts out of these provisions. The company also called into question whether the proxies are actually unbiased in their assessment, given Texas attorney general Ken Paxton\u2019s suit against them for allegedly \u201cissuing voting recommendations that prioritize radical political agendas over sound financial principles and fiduciary duty,\u201d per a release from Paxton\u2019s office<\/a>.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, on behalf of the New York City Police Pension Fund, also wrote a letter urging fellow shareholders to vote against redomiciling in Texas, which Levine said, in combination with a proxy voting program that allows investors to automatically vote in accordance with board recommendations, \u201cwill only serve to entrench company leadership and ultimately disenfranchise shareholders.\u201d<\/p>\n Exxon Mobil decried the letter as \u201cpolitically motivated,\u201d and said there was no connection between redomiciling and its retail voting program.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This Oct. 26, 2006, file photo, shows an Exxon logo seen at a Dallas gas station.\u00a0(AP Photo\/LM Otero,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28,90037],"class_list":["post-311083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-tp-residential-real-estate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n