One of the great transparency furphies in the corporate world is that you can find out who are the top shareholders by looking in their annual reports. The problem is a flick through the annual reports of most of Australia’s largest companies you may think you are reading the same list over and over again.

Most of the names on the list are nominee companies. The biggest ones in Australia are HSBC Custody Nominees (Australia) Ltd, JP Morgan Nominees Australia Ltd and National Nominees Ltd.

Nominee companies are custodian services that allow investments from a number of investors to be aggregated into one entity. According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) they typically hold securities, arrange the banking of dividends and some form of consolidated reporting. They don’t engage with senior management or boards about how companies are run on behalf of their clients.

In fact, large listed companies raised the use of nominee companies as a key barrier to engaging  institutional investors in submissions to the 2008 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into barriers to the effective engagement of shareholders on corporate governance. The companies said the use of nominee entities also made finding the ultimate owners of shares difficult. This makes it very hard to align the long-term investment goals of superannuation funds and the short-term remuneration and performance goals of senior management and professional investors.

The parliamentary committee also found that institutional investors, such as superannuation funds, made decisions about whether to engage with companies’ management and boards based primarily on the economic cost to them. Some found engagement to be a distraction from their stated primary role of generating investment returns. The use of nominee companies would provide a useful way of distancing themselves from the companies and, therefore, actual engagement.

So it appears institutional investors not only don’t canvas the opinions of the people that provide them the money to invest, they are not that interested in engaging with the companies they invest in either. If they do, they certainly don’t share it with their clients.