Probably the most extraordinary moment of BHP Billiton's AGM came when the senior management team performed a tap dance for shareholders. Then there was the fistfight that broke out over canapés. And the announcement that the company wants 50% of its workforce to be female by 2025. Clearly I'm making that up. But those things could have happened - I can't be sure. You see, the first hour of the AGM was a closed-door Q&A session for investors to quiz CEO Andrew Mackenzie and his colleagues, a sort of pre-AGM AGM, to which the press was not invited. Later, during the main session, Mackenzie answered a question about the Samarco clean-up operation in Brazil by saying: "We had a bit of a debate about this in the information session earlier, but I won't repeat everything I said." Well, that's a shame; I suppose we'll never know, will we? "Transparency is our middle name," he said later, apparently without irony. BHP's experiment with a closed-door session was ill-judged, and probably won...
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