Votes at company shareholders meetings should be made public by law, trade unions have said.
Managers of pension and other savings funds should be forced to reveal how they vote in corporate shareholders' meetings, the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) has demanded.
Research from the group shows that many fund managers and other large-scale investors are deliberately failing to make these records public. These refusals come despite the introduction of a 2007 government-backed voluntary code of conduct for the disclosures.
When approached by the TUC, 23 out of 49 of the savings funds surveyed did not respond to a request to reveal their manager's voting records. This 45 per cent response rate is similar to the previous year's survey from the unions - but well down on the 68 per cent of fund managers who responded in 2005.
Responding to the new results, TUC said that the 2007 voluntary code should now be made mandatory, in order to force the fund managers into providing greater clarity about their investments.
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber commented: "There is now a hard core of fund managers who continue to keep their votes secret, despite pressure from the Government, consumer groups and even their own trade bodies. They should remember that this is not their own money, but that of ordinary pension scheme members and other savers.
"Even those companies that do disclose do so in different ways, making it hard to compare voting records… the voluntary approach has achieved some progress, but not enough. Unless the laggards get on board fast, the government will need to use its reserve power and make disclosure compulsory."
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