ASX steps in to save Rio Tinto’s blushes after embarrassing AGM announcement error

Rio Tinto chairman Dominic Barton.

Rio Tinto’s board has just been handed its hat by Palliser Capital – at least according to the company’s first draft of history, which awarded the dissident shareholders a big victory in its efforts to force the mining giant to drop its dual-listed structure.

“A significant majority of Rio Tinto shares, representing 19.35 per cent of votes cast, were voted against the requisitioned resolution, in line with the board’s recommendation. Rio Tinto recognises that shareholders representing 80.65 per cent of votes cast chose to support the requisitioned resolution,” the company triumphantly announced after the Perth leg of its annual shareholder meeting on Thursday.

That would, indeed, be a mighty win for Palliser, almost ensuring the resignation of the board and a hasty rethink of Rio’s listing strategy.

But, as it happens, Rio’s investor relations team got the result arse-about.

Palliser’s motion attracted only 19.35 per cent support, as the results tally in the same document correctly recorded.

Normally journalists are well advised to avoid pointing out typos by others, given most have our own inglorious history. And Rio’s mistake is a relatively minor error in the scheme of things – nobody who really cares about the issue would have been in any doubt about the outcome of the vote. You’d have to wonder how the mistake got past the legion of lawyers and investor relations hacks that usually scrutinise these things at Rio, but nobody is perfect.

Here’s the thing, though … you wouldn’t know about Rio’s mistake from looking at the ASX platform. The only announcement available for public view is the one in which the offending paragraph is reversed, correctly awarding Rio’s board the win in the listings tussle.

But that’s not the usual rule on the ASX, which tells companies that if a document has already been released to the market, it generally won’t be possible to have it removed or replaced.

“Usually, the only course of action available at that point will be to lodge a corrective announcement,” says the ASX guidance note on the subject.

So, spot the error fast enough and you’re OK. Otherwise, you’re stuck with the embarrassment – ask any one of a plethora of ASX-listed juniors what that feels like.

Which would be fine, except that Margin Call has a copy of the offending document, courtesy of an eagle-eyed reader who spotted it on another distribution platform. So it was clearly “released to the market” in some form.

Given the depths of the woes faced by the ASX in other parts of its technology platform – not to mention recent decisions to step aside from its market supervision responsibilities – it’s amazing how fast the market operator can act to save the blushes of the big kids on the block, isn’t it?