“RWE faces townhall rebellion”

Influential municipal shareholders are threatening to pull out of Germany's largest electricity provider, RWE, unless the company's prospects brighten, reports Jürgen Flauger in German business daily Handelsblatt Global Edition. Guntram Pehlke, who runs RWE’s single-largest municipal shareholder, Dortmund’s utility company DSW21, told Handelsblatt he expects a 2016 dividend and warned that RWE needs to demonstrate its outlook is improving. “Otherwise, the municipal shareholders will have trouble explaining why they are engaged in RWE,” Pehlke said. RWE’s decision last year to cancel dividends for the first time since the 1950s cost already-strapped municipal shareholders 150 million euros, according to the report. A spokeswoman for RWE told Handelsblatt the company had not decided whether or not it will pay out dividends for 2016.

Find the article in English (behind a paywall) here.