In the interests of even-handedness it’s necessary to make a few points about Woolworths’s recent AGM, which, like Shoprite’s, was held entirely “out of person” — that is, unless you were a director or some sort of adviser to the group, you could only “participate” at the end of a video screen.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to treat these electronic-only events as serious shareholder meetings; difficult not to see them as the apotheosis of the box-ticking mentality that has captured corporate governance. As long as the form of the infinitely tedious King code is obeyed, companies seem to feel, they need not bother with the substance...

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