Investor Coalition for Equal Votes (ICEV)

The Investor Coalition for Equal Votes or ICEV (for short) was co-founded in 2022 by Railpen (ICEV Chair), the Council of Institutional Investors (Vice-Chair) and several of the US’ largest pension funds. In recent years, there’s been a significant increase in the number of companies (prior to them publicly listing) issuing different share classes with different voting rights. In practice, this sees classes of shares with more voting rights typically being offered only to insiders such as company founders, executives and family members, allowing them to retain control of the company. This raises important questions not only for investors but for the wider market as a whole. It means a small group of privileged insiders maintain much more control, while those with less voting power bear most of the financial risk. The knock-on effect is that this could damage the company’s financial performance as well as making markets work less effectively. ICEV is here to address this. We push back against the growing trend of companies listing with dual-class share structures.