2016-07-29bullionstar.com

From the World Gold Council 2015 accounts, by 2015, all WGC member dues (from the gold mining company members) had been phased out to zero, and the bulk of revenue, $66.9 million, came from the Sponsor Fees from the SPDR Gold Trust. Total revenue was $68.8 million. This meant that as of 2015, the GLD (a commercial ETF) was basically funding all of the operations of the World Gold Council (a non-profit association)... GLD shareholders are [now] essentially bank-rolling the entire operations of the World Gold Council. I wonder how many GLD shareholders are aware of this.

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as you will see in a future post about the ‘GLD consent solicitation proxy vote campaign', because this was, in my opinion, a very misleading and confusing non-stop campaign that bordered on bullying GLD shareholders, especially the retail shareholders, this could have also taken its toll and resulted in CEO / CFO departures from the SPDR Gold Trust sponsor, i.e. New York based World Gold Trust Services.

Finally, it would be interesting to see what the large institutional shareholders of GLD such as Paulson and Blackrock make of this high turnover rate in GLD Sponsor executives, and what their corporate governance and proxy voting teams think of the WGTS driven GLD proxy solicitation campaign and the rather unusual governance structure of the World Gold Council and World Gold Trust Services.



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