Can a shareholder of a publicly listed company who has agreed to a lockup agreement with the majority shareholder of the company in order to prevent the company from being taken over?

Ontario, Canada


The following excerpt is from Sterling Centrecorp Inc. et al., 2007 ONSEC 9 (CanLII):

In fact, lock-up or support agreements are common arrangements used to ensure that holders of significant blocks of shares will vote their shares in support of a plan of arrangement (or tender them to a bid, as the case may be), thus helping to ensure the success of the transaction. This is not illegitimate or improper, but rather this is the result of a carefully formulated policy that has now been in practice for several years. The Bingham case addressed this issue as well, as follows: One would think that a shareholder who makes a lockup deal like that must be taken to have been acting jointly with the proponent. However, if you make that assumption and if as a consequence of it, takeover proponents are not allowed vote shares [sic] acquired through such agreements, then the assumption could stifle enthusiasm for takeover bids. And that might not be a good thing: lockup agreements serve a useful purpose -- they can give takeover proponents some certainty that the deals they propose have a chance of success. Absent the comfort and assurance provided by a lockup agreement, fewer takeover bids might be launched; and since takeover bids are not necessarily bad, that could inhibit the fostering of an efficient capital market. (Bingham v. Ashton Mining of Canada Inc., [2007] B.C.J. 410 (B.C.S.C.) at paras. 51 and 52.)

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