Instead of creating multiple classes of shareholders, governments and regulators may want to think about how they define fiduciary duties in the financial realm.
However, as Chris Huhne, a British Euro-MP, points out, there could still be political opposition to the directive, and in particular to its proposal to outlaw the allocation of different voting weights to different classes of shareholders.
Happily, an experiment in dual classes of shareholders has long been under way in France, where shares often gain double voting rights after being held for a specified period—usually two years, although sometimes as long as ten.
"Here, we were trying to buy out 60 million shares and had four different classes of shareholders to convince this was a good idea -- along with Prime Retail's board of directors and management".
It is either up to Wrigley to do something by pushing the issue, or to Hershey's board, who might pressure the Hershey Trust by claiming this was a very good offer that would benefit all classes of shareholders equally.
"Meanwhile, thanks to a vote of support from all classes of shareholders this past week, Kairos under Melissa Doval is focused on building its business behind its new on-premise product," O'Hara wrote.
Companies will no longer be allowed to use their pension programs to treat their employees as an especially loyal and malleable class of shareholder; instead, pension funds will have to be diversified.
One potentially powerful class of shareholders — employees — seems to be rousing, too.
Several experts said the ruling would have little effect on securities fraud cases because a misrepresentation by a corporate executive is commonly seen as injuring a company's whole class of shareholders.
In the Oxford case, Sullivan & Cromwell, Oxford's lawyers, argued that two individual plaintiffs selected by Milberg Weiss were unfit to represent a class of shareholders claiming to have been defrauded by the company.
