Ralph V. Whitworth and Jon Lukomnik were honored for their institutional shareholder and corporate governance activities by the International Corporate Governance Network.
Mr. Whitworth, a founder and principal of Relational Investors LLC, a San Diego-based activist money manager, was awarded the ICGN's highest award of Lifetime Achiever, in recognition for his longtime work to improving corporate governance. Mr. Whitworth also is interim chairman of the board of directors of Hewlett Packard Co., appointed last April. He has been an HP director since 2011. “We see ourselves as stewards of our cli-ents' shareholdings,” Mr. Whitworth said in an ICGN statement. “Proper stewardship requires active engagement of corporate leadership to spur improved performance.”
Mr. Lukomnik, executive director of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute, New York, and a founder of the ICGN, was honored with the award for Excellence in Corporate Governance “in recognition of 30 years of thought leadership and action in the world of corporate governance.”
“Shareowners need to go beyond examining individual companies' financial results to look at the financial ecosystem itself,” Mr. Lukomnik said in the statement. “We need to add sustainability — of our companies, our capitalist system, our societies and our planet — to our mandate.”
ICGN has 600 members, representing pension funds and other institutional investors with combined assets of $18 trillion.