Thank you and, uh, welcome to everyone that is here and, uh, those that are, um, online. Thank you all, uh, for coming. Um, good morning. I'm Tony Robinson, the Chair of Pacific Current and the Chair of this, uh, meeting. As I said, I'm delighted to welcome you all to the annual general meeting of shareholders of Pacific Current Group Limited. Thank you for your attendance today. I would appreciate it if all mobile phones can be turned off or put on silent. I'd also like to point out the emergency exits, which are clearly marked in the hallway outside this, outside this room. The time is now 10:00 A.M., and as we have a quorum present, I declare the annual general meeting open. I'll now introduce you to the directors. Joining me today is, uh, Paul Greenwood, uh, managing director, CEO, and chief investment officer.
We're looking to add to that list of titles. Non-Executive Directors, Jeremiah Chafkin down right at the end on my left. Melda Donnelly, who's also Chair of Audit and Risk. Gilles Guérin, Clare Craven, our Company Secretary. Right at this end is Peter Kennedy, who's also Chair of Remuneration, Nomination, and Governance Committee. I thank each Director for their support and contribution during the year. Others here today that make a tremendous contribution to our business are David Griswold, Ashley Killick, our Chief Financial Officer. David's our General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer. Trent Erickson, our Chief Operating Officer, and I've already introduced you to Clare Craven, our Company Secretary. Do grab them to those that are here.
Don't hesitate to grab any of us or them at the end of the meeting if you've got any questions. Also got Chris at the back of the room, Head of this in Sales for the region. Probably the most interesting person to grab at the end. Finally, I note Rita Da Silva of Ernst & Young, our External Auditor, is also here. Rita will be provided a reasonable opportunity to answer questions you may have about the conduct of the audit. The agenda for today's meeting is set out on your screen. Before commencing with the formal matters before the meeting today, I'll outline the formalities of the meeting and then hand over to Paul to present an overview.
A brief overview of activities during financial year 2022, comment on strategy, and provide an outlook for the business. A question and answer session about the financial statements, the audit, and general questions of management will be held before the resolutions are put to the vote of shareholders. Only shareholders and proxy holders participating in person will be able to ask questions. Any shareholder or visitor who's listening to the audio webcast will not be able to ask questions, unfortunately. Formalities of the meeting. Notice of today's meeting was made available for all shareholders on our website, where you will also find the minutes of the 2021 AGM, our Constitution, and the 2022 Annual Report. I'll take the Notice as read and deal with the business of the meeting in the order it appears in the Notice.
Before we do that, I'll explain how voting and questions will work for the meeting. When you registered your attendance this morning, you'll have been issued with an attendance card. Those with a blue card can ask a question and vote at the meeting. Those with a yellow card can ask a question, but not vote. Visitors with a white card are not entitled to vote or ask a question. Your Board has determined that voting at the meeting will occur by way of a poll for all resolutions which require a vote. That you have enough time to vote, I will shortly open voting, and it will stay open until the meeting closes.
As advised in the notes of the meeting, either the original facsimile or electronic transmission of the proxy forms and any power of attorney or authority under which they're signed must have been received at least 48 hours prior to the date and time of this meeting, i.e., not later than 10:00 A.M. Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time on Saturday the 19th of November, 2022. Any proxy form received after this deadline included at the meeting is invalid. Only shareholders attending in person and by proxy may vote on the resolution. As we formally put a resolution to the meeting, the proxies received in relation to that resolution will be shown on your screen. That number will include votes on undirected proxies cast by me as Chair.
As set out in the notes of the meeting, as Chair, I will vote all directed proxies in accordance with the directions provided by shareholders and all undirected proxies I'll vote in favor of all resolutions. Today, we've appointed Tom Hughan of Computershare, the company's share registry, as the Returning Officer. He's just behind Ashley. After the votes have been counted and reviewed by the Returning Officer, the results of the meeting will be released to the ASX and available on our website. I now declare voting open on all items of business, and you can now submit your votes to the Returning Officer at any time. Questions and answers.
In relation to questions and comments, general business questions will be taken for item one, and questions related to each other item of business will be taken following introduction of that item. We ask that you keep your question short and to the point so that as many shareholders as possible have a chance to ask a question. If you wish to ask a question, please hold up your registration card, and when invited to speak, please identify yourself and then ask your question. I'll either answer the question or pass it to the most appropriate person to respond. That'll almost always be Paul. As Chair, I reserve the right to rule out questions that do not relate to the business of the meeting. Please note that if we receive multiple questions on one topic, they might be amalgamated together for a response.
We will also not answer questions that are the same or substantially the same to questions that have already been answered. Otherwise, we'll endeavor to answer as many questions as we can. Business overview is Paul. I'll now hand over to you, Paul.
Thanks, Tony. I will briefly touch upon the highlights for the FY 2022 and then touch on current trends we are seeing, then offer some thoughts about the future. Since some of this is a repeat from the annual results presentation, I'll move through the first part of this relatively quickly and focus more on the forward-looking comments. On page nine, and I think we've renumbered the slides, but I think that gets it, right? This sort of underscores some of the highlights of the year. Obviously one of the big highlights was the IPO of GQG, which was a large milestone for our company. It brought a significant realization event to us, but also made liquid a very valuable asset.
Depending on price of that investment, ultimately we're looking at having, including the unrealized portion where we've made, you know, 70x-80x to potentially 90x our money. It's a great investment, and we wish they all would work that way. Turns out, yeah. Turns out, you know, I may not live long enough to see another one of those. That was a big event during the year. We invested $35 million in a private real estate manager, Pennybacker Capital. We had strong growth across the portfolio, 19% FUM growth, and what's interesting about that is it was actually 18% of the exclude GQG. It wasn't just GQG, it was very broad.
We had received AUD 6.2 billion of new commitments during the year, and that excludes GQG. Once again, I'm excluding them because their assets are so large that it distorts some of the numbers. Obviously the equity markets have not been kind recently. That has certainly hurt us a little bit because we have some long-only equity managers that have exposure or obviously have exposure to that. Our diversification across private capital strategies have largely muted the impact of that. We had solid growth in underlying revenues and earnings last year. However, that growth was, we think, understated because we were unable to report 12 months of earnings from GQG. Had we done that would've been double-digit revenue and earnings growth.
Last year, performance fees grew dramatically, largely to increased performance fees from Victory Park. Page 10, which I won't dwell upon, just highlights the results in both U.S. dollars and Australian dollars. It's worth noting that the majority of our revenues are U.S. dollars. Page 11 shows the summary of the growth in the net asset value of the company. It's important to note here that we believe this net asset value is conservative because some of our investments, like Victory Park, Pennybacker, and ROC, are held at book value. If their fair value is greater than their book value, which we believe it is, it would not show up on this chart.
Basically the net asset value really only steps up here when we have some realization events for the non-fair valued assets. Page 13 shows the cumulative FUM growth for our managers across the portfolio. What you see is that's three-year cumulative FUM growth. At the end of the day, our fate will be a function of whether our businesses are growing or not, and you can see that in general, that has been the case. The exception here is Blackcrane. Blackcrane is a small investment that will probably be wound down that will not have any negative impact on our finances on a year-over-year basis. Page 15 touches on some of the trends we are seeing.
We haven't talked a lot about these, or at least explicitly. These probably won't be too surprising for people that follow this industry closely. Growth in alternatives, if you look where asset allocation is headed, it's increasingly going to alternative assets, increasingly private capital strategies within alternatives. We've been sort of preaching that gospel for a few years now. Sort of the next sort of variation of that or sort of a sub-trend is the democratization of alternative assets. What does that mean? It means that there are lots of very interesting strategies that investment managers are working to bring down to the retail and the high net worth level. There's a few reasons for that.
One is those assets are sort of under-owned in or those strategies are under-owned in those segments. Frankly, those investment managers can get better fees than they can in the institutional world. They're frankly, particularly in Australia, where what institutions will pay for private capital strategies has sort of compressed fairly dramatically. No one likes to hear about this, but decline in active management, the stock-picking industry is not a growth industry anywhere anymore. Doesn't mean there's not great investment managers where we believe there are, we believe we own stakes in some, but it doesn't have any secular tailwinds behind it. Frankly, I don't think it ever will again because of the availability.
In other words, I think it's a secular non-cyclical phenomenon. A lot of that relates to the availability of inexpensive alternative products that can largely proxy many active management strategies. Once again, we still think there's room for exceptional investment managers. We certainly continue to look at those. We need to be sober in our assessment of that. Another one we haven't talked about a lot, but it's become more relevant very recently, is pension de-risking. What does that mean? If you look at traditional pension funds or defined benefit funds, it really doesn't apply here in Australia as much as it does U.S. and Europe.
There is a move underfoot, and there has been for a long time, to what they call immunize those liabilities. What that really means is they want to move some of their assets into fixed income strategies versus equity or more capital appreciation-centered investments in order to have assets that more closely mirror the liability streams of their defined benefit plans. With interest rates popping up, you're seeing an increase in activity of folks moving to immunize those liabilities. The implication is to the extent we have defined benefit exposure in our portfolio, you know, we could be impacted.
Once again, the most direct impact would happen in liquid strategies like GQG because you can change those allocations easier than you can with a private capital strategy because those allocations are locked up for multiple years. The last one is rising asset management valuations. We're in the business of investing in asset managers, so we're seeing pressure. There's a lot of capital that's been dedicated to our space. At the large end of what we look at, we see valuations increasing. We think that in aggregate, this is a positive for us, and the reason for that is we tend to fit a little below where other people do.
We think we can still find investments in our size parameters, where we don't have to pay these higher valuations, and we think we may be a beneficiary of those higher valuations via the potential sale of part or all of some of our assets. That is not a foregone conclusion, but we know that there's a lot of interest in some of our assets. We continue to believe that there's some possibility that, you know, as we move into next year, that we could see some liquidity in portions of our portfolio. Go to the next slide. This is just a market update where we wanna help people understand where we have exposure to equity markets, for instance.
For those who know our story, you hear us talk about how we try to minimize that exposure, and we have. Obviously, if we have investments in long-only equity managers and stock markets go down, that hurts us. Our biggest exposure there is GQG. That's not news to anyone. The good news there is their performance continues to be exceptional, and they continue to have sort of a more positive flow dynamic than the industry at large. We, you know, have some, EAM would be negatively impacted by declining markets, and IFP would a little bit as well. Victory Park has a listed vehicle.
We expect that where there's some equity in that listed vehicle, we expect the incentive fees from that listed vehicle in this first half that we're in now of the fiscal year, we expect those to be down over last year. That's not to be confused with their carried interest or performance fees, which we'd have no change in our long-term assessment or even our short-term assessment. There's some mitigating. Interest rates going up doesn't help any assets. Just sort of the way when you value assets. What mutes the impact of all of this, of the sort of rising rates, rising inflation, decline in equity markets is, one, our diversification.
That diversification includes many assets where the revenues are unrelated to markets anywhere. In other words, the equity markets went down 90% tomorrow, we'd still get the same amount from the other investment partners. That's part of our strategy. I'd also note that rising interest rates to some degree help our private credit managers like Victory Park Capital because they lend at variable rates. To the extent the credit of their investments, they get that assessment right, they'll actually earn greater performance fees over time with higher interest rates. Moving on to page 17. I think this is operational. A few comments on our operational outlook. These are only modestly tweaked, I think, from our year-end results presentation.
This year we'll see an increase in expenses primarily due to increased travel and entertainment as we get back on planes and run around the world trying to execute our strategy. The other new development is our new line of credit on which we've already drawn $30 million . We expect to deploy capital into multiple investments this fiscal year with that capital. Despite a less hospitable market environment, we continue to believe our portfolios ex GQG will bring in somewhere between $3 billion and $5 billion of gross new commitments in this fiscal year. We are well on our way to achieving that. Going on to the last page that I'll touch on, the financial outlook.
We expect this year to actually be a good year, primarily even despite what equity markets are doing, primarily on the back of what we expect to be a quite strong second half. This is consistent with what we said beforehand. We have good visibility into the second half. The reason we are confident relates to fundraising achievements that we have visibility into, as well as the deployment of capital through some of our managers, most notably Victory Park, who starts earning revenue once they deploy capital. Right now, if they have it and haven't deployed it, they don't get paid. As the year progresses and as they deploy capital, their revenues will accelerate.
` On that note, we continue to believe that in FY 2024, Victory Park will become our leading economic contributor. You know, our forecasts have it staying that way, you know, sort of indefinitely. After that, all things equal. And then I think you'll see us deploy capital throughout the year. There's always uncertainty around that, and sometimes deals fall over, investments fall over at the last minute. But we feel good about our pipeline and expect to deploy a significant amount of capital. So with that, I will end my remarks and hand it back over to Tony.
Thank you, Paul. I'll just add a couple of comments to that. One, GQG's a wonderful outcome for us as an investment. The hidden gem in the listing for me was that we often have to sell an asset for people to get sight of the real value of what we own. You know, all of the sales we've made of assets have been significantly above fair value. Often that only becomes transparent when we sell. The listing of GQG allows you to see that without us having to sell down the holding. It was, you know, just a nice little additional benefit from the listing of it. The other thing I'd just add to Paul's comment is a very positive outlook for 2023.
You know, we've got good growth in all of the businesses as the fund flow annualizes and is deployed, as Paul has noted. Also the annualization of the investments. You know, what investments we've made partway through the year annualize for a full year's contribution in 2023. There's a quirk in this year's annualization related to GQG, again, being that we could only recognize what was going to be held, but for the whole year, we could only recognize 9/12 of the earnings for the year because of the brilliance of the accounting standards that we have in Australia, as I look at Rita. We get the annualization of GQG as well.
2023 is looking a very good year for us. Back to the business of the meeting. We now move on to the formal business of the meeting, consideration of the reports. The first item of business is the receipt and consideration of the 2022 Annual Report of Pacific Current Group Limited, and there is no resolution to be considered by shareholders related to this. The 2022 Annual Report contains a Financial Report, Directors' Report, and the Independent Auditor's Report. A copy of the 2022 Annual Report was made available on the company's website, the ASX platform, and was sent to those shareholders who requested a copy. The financial statements have been approved by the directors and audited by EY. I'll take the Annual Report as read. I'll now open for a minute questions for the auditors.
Questions may be asked of the auditors in relation to conduct of the auditor, the preparation and content of the audit report, the accounting policies adopted by the company and the independence of the auditors. Does anyone have any questions of Rita related to those reports? Rita's braced and ready. Okay. No question to the auditors received prior to the meeting either. We did, however, receive a number of questions from shareholders prior to the meeting, and they all relate to two issues which I'll now answer. The first is whether we can provide more transparency on the fair value of our investments. The second is on whether it's appropriate to introduce a share buyback. I'll give brief answers to these and then ask Paul if he wants to add anything to them. The first one is the buyback.
I always say to people that our problem, if there's a problem in the business, it's that if we think of the management costs as a percentage of the assets under management and the asset under management is the net asset value, you know, of the business, our expenses as a percentage of them are high. Our goal is to hold those costs stable and to grow the assets under management by investing well and having realizations that see those assets being traded at market price rather than at fair value. To do a buyback actually takes your asset base down and therefore increases the implicit cost of managing the residual funds.
At this stage, it's not our intention to do a buyback, and that's the logic and reason for that.
Can I add something there?
Yeah.
On that, the other challenge we face is just a really practical one, which is our business model is engaging in transactions, and so buying and selling assets. If we are ever close to buying a significant asset, that is material non-public information. If we're about to do that, we can't go buy back our stock when that's outstanding. For example, if someone has approached and made an offer to one of our portfolio companies, something totally outside our control, that will once again preclude us from doing that. Practically speaking, I think we've had a window that even if we wanted to, probably once in five years.
Mm-hmm.
We've ever had a window where we even could have done it. It's just something. Nature of our business makes that very unlikely that we could do that.
Thank you, Paul. The other one is fair value and again, the quirk of the accounting standards are there are certain of our assets where there's a lift in the fair value or our assessment of the fair value, and we calculate fair value as effectively the present value of future cash flows. Where that's for certain assets higher than the book value, we're not allowed to bring that to account under the accounting standards. There's a gap between our assessment of the aggregate fair value of all our investments and what you can see in the annual report. The question is about, can we be more transparent about what we have as those fair values? We'll start doing that from the 30 of June.
We'll provide a nice simple table. We won't try and do it for 31st of December just because the rigor that we apply to those is a little less because they're unaudited accounts, and you're required to, you know, see whether there's a change in value rather than do a lot of work on actually establishing the value. It'll be the 30 June thing that we do each year, but we will start doing that from 30 June 2023, providing a table of fair value and the movements in the fair value and whether they're recognized in the balance sheet via the balance sheet or via the P&L. I think you'll all find that helpful and interesting. Paul, do you want to add anything?
I would say that it will be. You know, directionally, I think that will be very helpful. However, even once we provide fair values, I don't think. Keep in mind that's using a valuation methodology that auditors are comfortable with. I would not mistake that for that being an estimate of what those assets would sell for.
Mm.
Because we're in the trenches and know and have a, you know, good sense of what certain assets may transact at, I would expect the fair values that we ultimately share with the public to still be conservative by relative to what any transaction would occur at.
They are the most defendable, just for clarity.
Yeah.
We're comfortable that they're good estimates of fair value. Paul's rightly pointing out, though, that whenever a transaction occurs, they generally occur significantly above the fair value within our balance sheet.
That was at GQG.
No better example of that than GQG.
Which was fair valued and then went public at 3x the fair value.
Yeah. Any other questions anyone would like to ask on the general matters associated with the business? I'll ask again, Jim.
I seem to have lost my proxy between getting to the desk and coming here, but please excuse me.
Yeah.
Other questions. First of all, sorry. First of all, let me compliment the Board and the management team on a fantastic year. As a shareholder, the amount of value add over the year, particularly through GQG, was fantastic. My question goes to whether or not there's any impact on the portfolio of the change in technology values and cryptocurrency, BTC, any of the businesses that you invest in or have been anywhere impacted?
As far as I know, no. You know, the nice thing is, you know, Victory Park will invest in what they would call fintech companies. They're a debt investor.
Yeah.
They might, and I'm gonna caveat this answer a little bit, but, you know, primarily they're just loaning money. Where there is, now that I think about it, there's a modest impact, is Victory Park has several SPACs that they've sponsored. Some of those are, you know, is tangential to or involved in, you know, have some involvement in sort of crypto. That's, I'd say those are sort of would be foregone optionality as opposed to.
Yeah.
Anything that impacts their sort of ongoing contribution.
We try and highlight where there's a contribution to the P&L from a movement in that carrying value rather than earnings.
Yeah.
You'd see that. I think Victory Park might even have some warrants from some of the companies that they lend to, 'cause they're early stage. There might be some movement there. We had a two-day offsite on Thursday and Friday. The Board hasn't been together for nearly three years, so it was a chance to catch up and exchange ideas and deal with some issues about longer-term, you know, strategy. We also had a person in, a professor of finance from the Melbourne Business School in for half a day talking about crypto, you know, and blockchain. It was a fascinating conversation because she was absolutely of the belief that it's an investable class. This is after the collapse of one of the exchanges.
It is, it's a really interesting area. The consensus, overwhelmingly, I'd say the unanimous view by the Board was it's not investable class. I don't think I'm putting words in anyone's mouth there. We won't be looking at that as a class. Anyone else got any other questions? Right. There are no more questions. I'll now move on to the next item of business. These are the resolutions. Resolution 1. The first resolution of the meeting is the adoption of the remuneration report. Resolution 1 is an advisory resolution and does not bind the directors or the company. The remuneration report was contained within the 2022 A nnual Report, is available on the company's website and was posted to shareholders on request. I'll take the remuneration report as read.
Further details about the resolution are also contained in the explanatory memorandum to the notes of the meeting. The resolution is set out on the s- on the screen. Before putting resolution one to the meeting, I'd like to advise shareholders that the company will disregard any votes as stated in the voting exclusion, uh, statement related to resolution one, as set out in the notes of the meeting. The directors abstain in the, uh, interest of good governance from making a recommendation in re- in relation to resolution one. Are there any questions or comments on this resolution? All right. If there are no further, uh, if there are no questions, I'll, a s there are no questions, I'll now put the resolution one to the meeting. Uh, again, don't hesitate to fill in the, uh, voting forms.
You can do it at any time and for all of them. Don't wait for the resolution. You're welcome to wait, but don't feel you need to wait. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are shown on the screen. Please vote if you haven't already. Overwhelming support for the resolutions. Having said that, there's probably a good number of additional votes in the room. Obviously we'll be voting the Chairman's votes in favor of the resolution unless we're otherwise directed. I'll now move to the next resolution. Resolution 2 to 4, each to be considered as ordinary resolutions must be approved by a simple majority of the votes cast by shareholders present and entitled to vote on the resolution.
Resolution 2, re-election of Melda Donnelly. Melda retires in accordance with the company's constitution and being eligible, offers herself for election as a Non-Executive Director of Pacific Current Group. Ms. Donnelly, a Chartered Accountant, is a founder and former Chairperson of the Centre for Investor Education, a specialist education and consultancy firms for executives in the Australian superannuation industry, institutional investment bodies, and the financial services market. Ms. Donnelly's previous work experience includes serving as CEO of the Queensland Investment Corporation, Deputy Managing Director of ANZ Funds Management, and Managing Director of ANZ Trustees. Melda is a Non-Executive Director of GQG Partners Inc., and a Chair of Coolabah Capital Investments Proprietary Limited.
Melda held a range of directorships of both Australian and international companies, including Non-Executive Director of Ashmore Group plc, Trustee Director of UniSuper, Deputy Chair of the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, Chair of Plum Financial Services Nominee Pty Ltd, and a member of the Investment Committee in HESTA Superfund. Further information in relation to Melda's background and experiences in the notice of meetings. Goodness me, we can't have missed much. Melda clearly wrote this sales pitch. The resolution is set out on your screen. The directors, with Melda abstaining, recommend shareholders vote in favor of the re-election of Melda Donnelly as a Director of Pacific Current. Melda is a terrific part of the Board and makes an enormous contribution, so we're delighted to be recommending her to you. Are there any questions or comments?
If there are no questions, I'll now put Resolution 2 to the meeting. The proxies received in relation to this resolution is shown on the screen. Welcome now to vote for that again. As I said, you can vote obviously at any time on any of these resolutions. Now I'll move to the next resolution, re-election of Gilles Guérin as a Director. Gilles Guérin retires in accordance with the company's constitution and being eligible offers himself for election as a Non-Executive Director of Pacific Current Group. Gilles was formerly the CEO of BNP Paribas Capital Partners, where he worked for the past 11 years, developing the alternate investment capabilities of that group. He previously served as Chief Executive Officer and President of Natixis Global Associates and Executive of Natixis AM North America.
He also held executive and senior leadership position as HDF Finance, AlphaSimplex, IXIS AM, and Commerz Financial Products. Mr. Guérin, Gilles has more than 20 years' experience in capital markets and investment management. This includes core cross-asset class experience spanning equities, fixed income, and commodity markets with a specific focus on alternative strategies and hedge funds. Further information in relations to Gilles' background and experience is in the notes of the meeting. The resolution is set out on the screen. The directors, with Gilles abstaining, recommend shareholders vote in favor of re-electing him as a director of Pacific Current Group. Again, wonderful to have Gilles on the Board. He makes a terrific contribution, as Gilles is based in France, and so brings a European perspective as well as a global perspective to it, which is enormously helpful.
He's the kindest of the directors, undoubtedly, because we have to schedule meetings that fit in with the time zones of Seattle and L.A. and Melbourne and Paris. Gilles is the one that takes the ugly time each time. He makes a terrific contribution and does it at some personal cost. We're delighted to recommend him to you. Any questions? If there are no questions, I now put Resolution three to the meeting. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are shown on the screen. Again, please mark for or against or abstain. Now move on to the next resolution, Resolution four, approval of benefits to specific employees on the cessation of employment in certain circumstances or on transfer of undertakings or property of the company.
The next resolution of the meeting is to consider and, if thought fit, to approve benefits to specific employees on the cessation of employment in certain circumstances or on transfer of undertaking or property of the company. Section 200B of the Act prohibits a company from providing a benefit to an employee in a managerial or executive office in connection with his or her retirement from or other cessation of office without shareholder approval under Section 200E. Similarly, Section 200C, this is way more detailed than most of you are hoping for, but Section 200C of the Act prohibits a company from providing a benefit to an employee in a managerial or executive office in connection with the transfer of the whole or any part of the undertaking or property of the company.
Accordingly, shareholder approval is being sought to allow the early vesting of options and/or performance rights or a payment to specific employees of the value of some or all of those option or performance right in certain circumstances. Further detail of this resolution is set out in the notes of the meeting. The resolution is set out on your screen. Before putting Resolution four to the meeting, I'd like to advise shareholders that the company will disregard any votes as stated in the Voting Exclusion Statement related to Resolution 4, as set out in the Notice of Meeting. The directors recommend you vote in favor of Resolution 4. This, to me, is a very simple one. It's extraordinary that the corporation does what it does in this area.
You know, I find it, you know, along with a few other bits, quite puzzling that the Boards don't retain the right to do this. You know, I always use the example of, you know, someone, you know, traveling to, you know, London out of Seattle and, you know, they have a serious health issue while they're working and therefore will find it hard to return to work. Obviously the event is a product of the work that they're doing, you know, the stresses and strains of those sorts of travel events. The Board's prohibited from allowing the vesting of the LTI entitlement even in those sort of circumstances.
That's really what we're looking for here is where people are retiring for good reason because that's the only time that the Board would use its discretion here, where they're retiring for good reasons or where the company is taken over and the Board thinks it's appropriate that they vest. We are happy to recommend you vote in favor of the resolution. Are there any questions?
Brian Short. I'd like to say compliment the Board on the progress that they've taken the company over for recent years. Excellent. Just with this particular resolution, I see that it's placement of three years. Is this it for three years or will there be annual recommendations coming forward for the able executive years or what's the term?
No. Great question. What we're doing here is getting authority from the shareholders to use our discretion as they apply to the instruments on issue at this moment. If we issue new instruments, we'd have to come back and talk to shareholders about those. This applies to the instruments and therefore the life of the instruments that are on issue at the moment. The performance rights and options that those individuals hold as at today. Does that? Yeah. Any other questions anyone's got? All right. If there are no other questions, I'll put resolution forward to the meeting. Proxies received in relation to this resolution are shown on the screen. Please now complete your form if you haven't previously done so.
I'll again ask, because that's the last resolution, is there any other question anyone would like to ask about any other part of the proceedings or the business or the outlook for the business? All right. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the discussion and voting on the resolutions for the meeting. The voting system will close at the end of the meeting. Once voting has been closed, all voting will be final and cannot be changed. Could you please check that you've cast your votes on all resolutions? The Returning Officer will collect your votes as he comes around. Right. Just Tim tells me that everyone's lodged their votes. I'll just make sure. Has anyone not lodged their votes? Terrific. That concludes the business as set out in the notice of meeting.
On behalf of the Board, I'd like to thank you for your support and attendance and participation today. Polls take some time to count to obtain the final result as advised earlier. After the votes have been counted, the results of the poll will be released to the ASX as soon as possible. Please stay around as long as you'd like. We'll be here for a little bit. Look forward to talking to you all. I now close the meeting. Thank you all.