Go-Ahead suffers vote miscount in latest embarrassing blunder

Go-Ahead, the UK public transport group whose shares are suspended from the London Stock Exchange, has suffered another embarrassing blunder after a miscount at its annual meeting last month allowed a senior board member to survive a vote he lost.

The company said on Wednesday that Adrian Ewer, head of the audit committee, has stepped down with immediate effect after a mistake in counting proxy votes at the December 21 meeting was discovered, overturning his majority support.

It pinned the blame on Equiniti, an outsourcing company that ran the meeting, for failing to include more than 3m proxy votes in the count that had originally given Ewer the support of 53.5 per cent of the shareholders who took part in the ballot.

It is the latest embarrassment for the company, which was stripped of the Southeastern rail franchise last year after failing to declare money owed to the government.

As a result, it missed the deadline for filing its annual results, while auditor Deloitte raked over its rail business, leading to the suspension of its shares on the LSE at the start of this year.

The company said it still did not know when it would be able to release the results, which were originally due on September 30.

The government seized control of the Southeastern rail franchise after the group failed to declare more than £25m in taxpayer funding since 2014 that should have been returned.

The problem, discovered by a government official, concerned unreturned financial support to cover track access fees for High Speed 1, the rail link that connects London with the Channel Tunnel through the south-east of England.

There were also issues with calculating the repayments on profit-share agreements with the Department for Transport.

Go-Ahead has previously apologised for “serious” failings in its rail business and said an independent review had confirmed Southeastern had breached its contractual obligations.

The franchise was operated through Govia, a joint-venture with France’s Keolis.

The company has submitted the findings of the review to the Department for Transport, warning investors it might have to make a provision for a fine in its long-awaited annual results.

While the mistake at the annual meeting is a fresh headache for the company, Ewer had been preparing to step aside following the Southeastern debacle and knife-edge shareholder vote.

Dominic Lavelle, who was appointed to the role of designate chair of the audit committee on January 1, has replaced Ewer.

Go-Ahead’s chief financial officer Elodie Brian stepped down last year after the government took control of Southeastern.

Equiniti said Go-Ahead was the only company affected and the incident had been “thoroughly investigated and resolved”.