ESSEN (dpa-AFX) - Outgoing Supervisory Board Chairwoman Doreen Nowotne has promoted the management's course to Brenntag shareholders. "This is an important shareholders' meeting for Brenntag," she said Thursday at the online shareholders' meeting. Brenntag, she said, is in the midst of a transformation, in the midst of building and establishing a new organizational structure worldwide, in the midst of implementing a new strategy and in the midst of embedding a new culture. This process is enormously multi-layered and complex. And that is why it requires continuity, also at the level of the Supervisory Board. She is to be succeeded by Richard Ridinger, who has been a member of the supervisory body since 2020.

At the AGM, Brenntag shareholders voted by a majority in favor of the Brenntag Supervisory Board candidates and in favor of the resolutions presented by Brenntag. Meanwhile, critic and financial investor Primestone objected to the majority of the resolutions.

While the Supervisory Board shares the criticism of some shareholders that "Brenntag's specialties division has not yet been as successful as it could and should be," the chairwoman of the Supervisory Board, who has been in office for more than 13 years, conceded. She added that the implementation of the transformation was running at full speed. This phase is the core of the transformation. Brenntag had grown regionally over decades. The establishment of the two divisions represents a major change and is a process that cannot be completed overnight. This change requires time before it bears fruit.

For months, Brenntag's management has been engaged in an exchange of blows with activist investors. In particular, the British financial investor Primestone, which holds a good two percent of Brenntag, is attracting attention. Primestone wanted to prevent Brenntag's proposed election of Ridinger, former head of the Swiss fine chemicals group Lonza, as chairman of the supervisory board and Suja Chandrasekaran as a member of the supervisory body from going through at the shareholders' meeting. The British financial investor had made two proposals of its own for the Supervisory Board in the form of former chemicals manager Geoff Wild and ex-Goldman Sachs banker Joanna Dziubak.

Ultimately, both Primestone and the US hedge fund Engine Capital want Brenntag to split into the two divisions for specialty and basic chemicals. The investors hope that this will lead to a rapid increase in value./mne/knd/jha/men