“As JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon prepares for a vote tomorrow on whether he should keep his chairman and chief executive officer titles, he may take comfort knowing most of his biggest shareholders are led by men with the same dual role.
Seven of JPMorgan’s 10 largest owners — including top five BlackRock Inc. (BLK), Vanguard Group Inc., State Street Corp. (STT), Wellington Management Co. and FMR LLC — are run by CEOs who are also chairmen. The top 10 hold a combined 29.5 percent of New York-based JPMorgan’s stock, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
“People just like him are going to vote on this,” said Erik Gordon, a business and law professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “If you’ve told your own board that the best structure for the sake of the company is to combine the roles, then how do you turn around and say, ‘But that’s not true for JPMorgan?’”
Of JPMorgan’s top 10 shareholders, only Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price, the seventh-biggest with a 2.15 percent stake, has commented publicly on Dimon’s role. Brian Rogers — T. Rowe Price’s chairman and chief investment officer, and not the CEO – – said in a May 16 statement that “I fully support the combined chairman and CEO role at JPMorgan under the superb leadership of Jamie Dimon.”
