Social media giant Facebook has been facing a pressure from several shareholders urging the removal of the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg from the company’s board of directors. Demanding Mark’s expulsion, a watchdog group of shareholders called SumOfUs has filed a proposal to replace him with an independent chairperson who could take the company forward with better corporate governance, stated VentureBeat. Mark Zuckerberg have been on the board since 2012.
The marketing website also quoted Intel’s former chairperson Andrew Grove as saying,”The separation of the two jobs goes to the heart of the conception of a corporation. Is a company a sandbox for the CEO, or is the CEO an employee? If he’s an employee, he needs a boss, and that boss is the board. The chairman runs the board. How can the CEO be his own boss?”
According to the reports by VentureBeat, this development came after 3,33,000 people filed a petition asking Zukerberg’s removal as the Chairperson of the board of directors while only 1,500 among that huge number were shareholders.
But on the other hand, this move won’t effect much the founder of Facebook as Zukerberg himself holds a considerable amount of the company shares, and owns an important right in the decision making ways of the company.
Further, the report posted by the website claims,”We think that a single person assigned for two roles affects company’s governance in a negative way and can harm shareholder value. We believe that independent board leadership would be particularly constructive at Facebook as our company faces increasing criticism regarding its perceived role in the promotion of misleading news; censorship, hate speech and alleged inconsistencies in the application of Facebook’s community standards guidelines and content policies.”
As reported by VentureBeat, SumOfus is a group which works online and holds firm’s accountable fro various matters including worker right, discrimination, corruption etc.
