LAST week was another exciting week in Singapore and we are not talking about the opening of the latest Captain America movie. We are of course talking about the busiest week of the year for annual general meetings (AGMs), a week that would have required almost superhuman qualities of shareholders (and some directors) to cope. Like the expected arrival of the latest superhero movie in the last week of April here in the coming years, this "hot April" meeting period is not going away anytime soon - if we do not seriously consider taking steps to address it.

In our second report on shareholder meetings in Singapore titled The Singapore Report on Shareholder Meetings: Shareholders Awaken? published last month, our first recommendation was that our regulators should consider having a public consultation with investors, issuers and other stakeholders on whether to allow AGMs to be held within five months after the financial year-end, rather than the current four months.

This follows our first report in 2015 where we examined clustering of AGMs in a number of Asia-Pacific and global markets and concluded that the clustering of year-ends together with the deadline for holding AGMs after the year-end are important contributors to the clustering of AGMs. Of the G-7 countries of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the United States, only Japan with a three-month deadline has a shorter AGM deadline than Singapore.