| Activist Scales Hotel with Tibetan Flag and Calls on Bombardier to Leave Tibet | ||||||||||
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Posted on 06/10/2005 12:46:20 AM PDT by Gengis Khan
| Activist Scales Hotel with Tibetan Flag and Calls on Bombardier to Leave Tibet | ||||||||||
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Tuesday, June 7, 2005 Updated at 10:01 PM EDT
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Montreal — Bombardier Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Laurent Beaudoin defended the family's continued grip on voting control of the global industrial giant at its annual meeting yesterday.
Pressed by a few shareholders during question period about the need for the dual-class share structure, Mr. Beaudoin said it has been good for the Montreal-based company and he sees no need to change it.
“So far, it has served the company well,” he told one shareholder.
“For now, there is no intention to change the structure.”
A second shareholder elicited applause when he suggested it's time for the company to get with the tenor of the times and provide for a one-share, one-vote system.
After the meeting, Mr. Beaudoin said nobody complained about the dual-class share structure when Bombardier was flying high and spinning off profits, but that the criticism has risen ever since the plane and train maker hit the turbulence of the past few years, resulting mainly from the difficulties of the U.S. airline industry.
In fact, he added, “Bombardier would not be here today if there had not been the multiple voting shares. We would not have had the growth we had because the majority shareholders would have objected to certain acquisitions and ... expansion.”
The same rule of thumb applies to other successful Canadian companies, he said.
“If you look at the series of Canadian companies that have multiple votes, among them you will see that the majority are the best performing in their sectors.”
Members of the founding family — including Mr. Beaudoin, who married a daughter of founder J. Armand Bombardier — control about 55 per cent of the voting shares. Their share of the total equity is about 16 per cent.
Mr. Beaudoin and fellow executives also faced criticism yesterday from shareholder activists over Bombardier's participation in a Chinese railway project that is being described as a threat to Tibet's cultural survival.
“We don't want to be complicit in the cultural genocide of Tibet, be it directly or indirectly,” Tenzin Dargyal of the Canada Tibet Committee said during the stormy question period.
The $3.2-billion (U.S.) railway, due to begin test runs next year, is a high-altitude line linking the city of Golmud, in western China, to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.
Montreal-based Bombardier is the lead company in a consortium — with Power Corp. of Canada and two Chinese firms — that will build 361 high-tech cars with enriched oxygen systems. Another Canadian company, Nortel Networks Corp., has been contracted to supply the rail line's wireless communications system.
Critics say the Chinese project will speed the movement of ethnic Chinese into Tibet and the cultural assimilation and political colonization of the two million Tibetans who live in the region.
Mr. Beaudoin told shareholders that Bombardier is not the builder of the railway and is simply acting as a supplier. “I don't think it's our responsibility to settle the political issues between China and Tibet,” he said.
Also yesterday, Pierre Beaudoin, the head of Bombardier's aerospace unit, reiterated that the company is committed to an all-new engine, rather than a modification of an existing one, for its proposed C Series airliner that would cut airlines' operating costs by 15 per cent.
He also confirmed previous statements by company officials that a decision on whether to officially launch the $2.1-billion (U.S.) development program for the 110- to 130-seat plane won't be made until the fall.
There had been expectations Bombardier would announce the launch at next week's Paris Air Show.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050607.wbomba0607/BNStory/Business/
Another reason to buy Embraer Airplanes instead of Bombardier CRJs.
| Allan Swift | |
| Canadian Press |
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MONTREAL (CP) - A shareholders rights group may sue the board of Bombardier Inc. over the golden parachute handed former chief executive Paul Tellier when he bailed out last December.
Yves Michaud, a well-known gadfly among Montreal companies, told the Bombardier annual meeting Tuesday he has begun legal proceedings to recover some of the money paid out to Tellier, who left after two years of a three-year CEO mandate.
Tellier was granted a severance payout of $5.84 million, as well as a million stock options and an annual pension of $360,000.
"Tellier's compensation gets the gold medal for indecency and provocation," said the verbose Michaud, as several hundred shareholders applauded.
Michaud noted that one of the members of the compensation committee that drew up the agreement with Tellier was Bombardier director Jean Monty, one-time CEO of BCE Inc. and, prior to that, Nortel Networks.
"He doesn't have a very prestigious business card," quipped Michaud.
Laurent Beaudoin, chairman and chief executive of the firm controlled by the Bombardier family he married into, said Tellier had to be offered a premium to lure him away from Canadian National Railway Co.
"Mr. Tellier did great things for Bombardier," he added.
A related proposal submitted by the Carpenters Pension Trust Fund, asking for more transparency on executive pensions, garnered 13.5 per cent of the votes.
Executives also had to defend the company's participation in a new train service between central China and Tibet, denounced by Tibetan activists as a way for China to solidify its domination over that region.
Bombardier announced in February that a joint venture will build 361 rail coaches for the high-altitude train, a project stretching 1,142 kilometres to be completed by the middle of next year.
"By partnering with the Chinese government on this project, Bombardier is giving complicit support for China's occupation and colonization of Tibet," said Tenzin Dargyal, a Quebec businessman speaking for the Canada Tibet Committee.
A small group waving Tibetan flags demonstrated outside the downtown hotel where the meeting was held. Police removed a 27-year-old man who had lowered himself onto a hotel roof by rope.
Beaudoin replied that his company is not involved in building the railway, just the coaches, and told shareholders: "It's not our responsibility to settle the political issues between China and Tibet."
Pierre Beaudoin, president of Bombardier Aerospace and Laurent's son, said later he is confident the company will be able to find a new engine supplier for its proposed CSeries family of aircraft.
Two engine-making consortiums pulled out of talks last month to develop a new engine, critical to the program.
Bombardier is now negotiating with individual companies, who would have to spend some $1 billion US to develop a more efficient engine.
"These engine makers like Pratt and Whitney, GE, Rolls Royce and Honeywell have had a lot of success with Bombardier," Beaudoin said.
"So it's a question of convincing them that the market is there, and that our business plan makes sense for us and for them."
Bombardier's languishing stock (TSX:BBD.SV.B) lost another nickel Tuesday, to $2.46.
Laurent Beaudoin repeated his defence of the company's two-tier share structure, that keeps control with the Bombardier family through multiple voting shares.
"That (system) has helped to create several profitable Canadian companies," Beaudoin said.
"At Bombardier we never had questions on multiple voting shares as long as we were making money and there was a good return on their investments. We've had a few bad years and now everybody is calling into question multiple-voting shares."
Say good-bye to the Tibetan culture/people, and don't expect the U.N. to help. This would only make news if somehow Americans or Europeans could be blamed as the agressors. Or if the Tibetan people became terrorists and attracted notice.
Potala Palace has been turned into Disneyland, and even Tibetan worshippers must buy a ticket to enter the "cultural museum".
But it more pervasive than that, and disgusting.
One of the problems with Tibetan buddhism is its prohibition against violence, even in self-defense.
Good luck to them and they'd better spin those prayer wheels. The Himalayan version of the dodos are running into the non-Buddhist Chinese.
Question to anyone out there. Are the Tibetans ethnically Han (Chinese) are distinct like the Ulygars and Hmong?
Tibetans are very different from the ethnic Han(Chinese). In facts Tibet (like Uighuristan) was never part of China. Tibet was overrun by communist China in 1952.( That was the time when Dalai Lama and a large number of Tibetans fled Tibet and came over to the Indian side.) The Tibetan Government in Exile and Tibetan culture still survives in India. Infact Dalai Lama has the Exiled Tibetan Government in Dharmashala (India).
I saw a TV documentary a while back, and the Chinese "assimilation" (aka destruction) of Tibetan culture is fast, furious, and horrifying.
Potala Palace has been turned into Disneyland, and even Tibetan worshippers must buy a ticket to enter the "cultural museum".
But it more pervasive than that, and disgusting.
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ping
There are Chinese posters who think they have a right to Tibet though. Very scary. They just blame Bin Laden for some reason and say it is for "security".
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