Voting trust

<h2 id="purposes">Purposes</h2>
<p>There are several reasons why shareholders may wish to put a voting trust arrangement in place.
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<ul><li>Several shareholders may wish to create a unified block of votes, which together gives them more power than the collective sum of their fragmented interests.</li>
<li>In many countries, to call <a href="/facts/General_meeting/GDHYMD7b">general meetings</a>, shareholders need to hold a certain percentage of the issued shares of the company.  By aggregating their shares, the shareholders can confer this power on themselves collectively where they might not have it individually.</li>
<li>Locking shares in voting trusts can, in some countries, help deter a <a href="/facts/Hostile_takeover/JGfEbTy0">hostile takeover</a>.</li>
<li>Voting trusts are sometimes used to resolve conflict of interest/conflicts of interest.  By putting the shares in a trustee who can vote them at arm's length from the beneficiary(ies) of the trust, this can in some circumstances mitigate or absolve the original shareholder from what might otherwise constitute a conflict of interest (although in practice, to resolve conflicts of interest the trust will ordinarily be "<a href="/facts/Blind_trust/rlRDsH9J">blind trust</a>"; while all blind trusts are necessarily voting trusts, not all voting trusts are blind trusts).</li>
<li>Shares are sometimes aggregated into a voting trust to facilitate a corporate reorganization.</li>
<li>Promoters of companies sometimes aggregate their shares in a voting trust to safeguard control of the company.</li></ul>

<h2 id="sample">Sample</h2>
<p><a href="http://contracts.onecle.com/talk/aol.vote.1997.02.22.shtml">Sample Voting trust agreement</a>
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Voting trust open-in-new

Voting trust