The Botswana Building Society Limited (BBSL) Management led by the Managing Director has vowed to proceed with the Annual General Meeting (AGM) tomorrow, with or without its Board of Directors.
According to the Managing Director Mr. Pius Komane Molefe, though the Board of Directors is trying by all means to block the AGM, the meeting will go ahead as planned. He further states that the elections will go ahead as planned whether the Board of Directors is present or not.
“Shareholders are assured that the meeting will go ahead. If the current Non-Executive Directors do not show up at the AGM, Shareholders will be asked to nominate one of their own to chair proceedings in line with the BBSL Constitution. The meeting will start at 09:00am, in person and on-line, on Friday 30 April 2021.” Molefe assured.
Molefe says that the reasoning advanced by the Board of Directors in their efforts to stop the AGM are neither here no there. He is of the view that their reasons are fuelled by selfish motivations as they can see that their numbers do not add up for them to win the elections.
“The Non-Executive Directors have started nit-picking the Notice for the 2020 Annual General Meeting to find fault with it so that they can invalidate it. The Non-Executive Directors also indicate that not all Shareholders received the Notice. There are 14,776 BBS Limited Shareholders in and outside Botswana and it would be impractical to expect all of them to have received the Notice despite the Company’s best efforts to do so. The Board is also aware there are 8,414 Shareholders who are being located through the Department of National and Civil Registration because internal efforts to contact them were not successful. Therefore, the Non-Executive Directors are engaging in this latest tactic because they realise that they do not have sufficient votes for their colleagues to be re-elected on Friday.” Molefe asserted.
All means, Molefe says, have been exploited in an effort to reach all the shareholders. These include publishing the Notice on the BBS website, the Botswana Stock Exchange (BSE) X-News platform, and some local Newspapers. This process of communication, Molefe says is the same which has always been used for the previous years and the Board did not question it. “It is also the same process which was followed to elect them to the Board at various times in the past.” he stated.
The Managing Director is further surprised that “the Non-Executive Directors are questioning the validity of the AGM Notice less than 48 hours before the meeting when in the last few weeks, they made an undertaking under oath that they would not stop the meeting of Shareholders and proceeded to appoint the audit firm Grant Thornton on Monday 26 April 2021 to oversee its proceedings.”
