Directors skip Home Depot’s annual shareholders’ meeting.

According to today’s W$J (see here), only a single director (the Chairman and CEO) attended Home Depot Inc.’s recent annual shareholders’ meeting, and he refused to answer questions as to why the other directors were not there. A commentor to this post about Halliburton’s annual shareholders’ meeting asserted that “[t]he purpose of the meeting is to allow shareholders the opportunity – just once a year – . . . to confront management if they so choose.â€? This may be the position of some shareholders, but it is not supported by state corporate law. As the Home Depot meeting demonstrates, there is no requirement that directors or other members of management even attend (although skipping the meeting is probably unwise from an investor relations standpoint). For more on the purpose of annual shareholders’ meetings, you’ll have to wait for my upcoming paper “The Case Against Mandatory Annual Director Elections and Shareholders’ Meetingsâ€? which I will post on SSRN in the near future.