The Sealaska Corporation states it has three shareholder resolutions on the current 2021 ANCSA election ballot.
This isn’t entirely true. The first resolution is the right to establish trusts for whatever management feels is OK. The trust can’t be rescinded and won’t be held to pay dividend based on shares held by shareholders any longer.
This is a management resolution subject to different rules than the other two.
The other two resolutions are true shareholder resolutions, imposing term limits and limited discretionary voting.
Sealaska’s management recommends a “yes” vote on the trust resolution and a “no” vote on the other two.
Passing resolutions within the corporation are based on the rule of 50% plus 1 of the entire stock held to approve the resolution. With only 60% of shareholders voting, the resolutions for term limits and the end of discretionary voting fails every other year and always will.
However, in the trust resolution management requires only a majority of voting approval to pass the resolution. This means as little as 25% can pass this Management resolution. It is not a shareholders resolution as the other two are. The other two resolutions remain under the rule 50 plus 1 and have been proven to be impossible to achieve, even for management. They would pass if under the same rule as the trust resolution.
In 2007, Sealaska’s management wanted new shareholders, in spite of two Sealaska surveys of shareholders rejecting the idea. Again management invoked the 25% rule and began a campaign to get the resolution passed. It passed, new shareholders don’t share in 7(i) revenue sharing with the other ANC Their dividends amount to penny’s per day.
Many shareholders feel management breached their fiduciary responsibility to original shareholders by working and being paid to devalue the stock.
Many of us shareholders of Sealaska know ANCSA and Sealaska were created for all to prosper.
Fifty years into the ANCSA’s social experiment, only a handful of Sealaska hierarchy and their corporate attorneys have.
Sealaska’s management has stagnated over the past five decades due to millions spent in scholarships but freeze’s new ideas and our educated people out with no term limits on board members and the injustice of discretionary voting.
The biased slated Board of Directors elections has made a handful of millionaires at the top of Sealaska but as many as 70% of Sealaska shareholders remain below the poverty line.
Allow the term limits resolution and discretionary voting resolution the same as the trust resolution and finally after five decades shareholders will guide the corporation.
• Dominic Salvato is an administrator of the Sealaska Shareholders Underground Facebook Group. Salvato resides in Anchorage. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
