ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS), a leading provider of
corporate governance solutions to the global financial community, today
announced the opening of its annual comment period for its 2012 proxy
voting policies. A critical component of ISS’ annual policy formulation
process, the comment period allows institutional investors, corporate
issuers, and governance market participants to provide feedback on ISS’
policy updates while they are still in draft stage. The comment
period runs through October 31 and includes ISS’ U.S. and
International policies.

“ISS firmly believes that incorporating multiple views on corporate
governance issues is critical for effective policy formulation,” said
Martha Carter, ISS’ Head of Global Research. “The uniquely transparent
and collaborative nature of our policy formulation process serves not
only to inform our policies, but also helps to create a higher level of
understanding and dialogue across the corporate governance community.”
We’re pleased to have evolved our process this year by engaging more
with the corporate issuer community and publicly posting all comments to
our draft policies. Through these steps and more, we continue to foster
transparency in governance practices and proxy voting globally.

To ensure its voting policies reflect the perspectives of the corporate
governance community and represent the collective voice of its
institutional clients, ISS gathers broad input each year from
institutional clients and market constituents through policy surveys,
issue-specific roundtables and this unique open comment period. Over 300
respondents weighed in on issues ranging from executive compensation and
board independence, to engagement triggers and social & environmental
issues. The full results from the survey are posted to ISS’ Policy
Gateway.

ISS will release its final 2012 U.S. and International Policy updates in
the week of November 14 and its Global Policy Summary and Concise
Guidelines in December. To participate in ISS’ comment period and learn
more about its Policy formulation process, please visit here.

About ISS

ISS, founded in 1985 as Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., is the
world's leading provider of proxy advisory and corporate governance
solutions to financial market participants. ISS' services include
objective proxy research and analysis, end-to-end proxy voting and
distribution solutions, turnkey securities class-action claims
management, and reliable governance data and modeling tools. More than
1,700 clients rely on ISS' expertise to help them make informed
corporate governance decisions. ISS is located in financial centers
worldwide and is a subsidiary of MSCI Inc., a leading provider of
investment decision support tools to investors globally. For more
information, please visit www.issgovernance.com.

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without limitation all text, data, graphs, charts (collectively, the
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Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS)
Cheryl Gustitus (301) 556.0395
cheryl.gustitus@issgovernance.com
or
Sarah Ball +44 (0)207 618 2275
sarah.ball@issgovernance.com