If you are the senior management team of a major public shipowner, what you want out of your annual shareholder meeting is the routine, the predictable, and maybe even the boring.

And by those measures, the gathering on Tuesday in Manhattan hosted by the board and officers of tanker owner International Seaways was a resounding success.

For some context, no one knew quite what to make of the session going into it. Only days earlier, largest shareholder John Fredriksen had publicly ripped management as “entrenched, shameless and self-interested,” then asked fellow investors to vote against a variety of company initiatives.

International Seaways fired back in kind, questioning why Fredriksen was looking to unseat two of the company’s three female directors and blasting him for making a mess of a failed merger attempt with Belgium’s Euronav.

So with the kettle on high boil, it was unclear whether it would bubble over when the meeting convened at a conference centre in midtown Manhattan.

In short, it did not. None of the 25 or so in attendance rose to comment on, much less oppose, any of the company’s proxy items. No “virtual” attendee chimed in either.

All 10 directors standing for re-election — including the “targeted” chief executive Lois Zabrocky and Kate Blankenship — were waved through. An advisory vote on executive pay was approved. And a three-year extension of the “poison pill” that blocks Fredriksen from accumulating more than 20% of shares was ratified.

The business portion of the gathering ended within 20 minutes.

Routine, check. Predictable, check. And boring ... well, yeah.

Now there are still a couple of caveats. While the proxy monitor read out “preliminary” results, there were no vote counts revealed as of this writing. Whether International Seaways’ management won their battles by a little or a lot will still prove interesting when the numbers finally are revealed.

Still, the perfunctory result reminded Streetwise why we have not been clamouring for admission to annual shareholder meetings over the years.

But there was also the reminder that the last one we experienced was quite a bit different.

It was November 2004. The setting was also in midtown Manhattan, this time at a hotel. And what ensued was an outright media circus, as Greek serial entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou led the press corps into a session in which he would defeat plans to sell the tanker company he had founded to Fortress Investments for $703m.

Stelmar founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou speaks at an industry conference in London in 2019. Photo: Duncan Phillips

Stelmar Shipping would sell the following month to New York-based Overseas Shipholding Group, which was aggressively looking to grow under new chief executive Morten Arntzen.

Careful readers may recall that the “old” OSG is the predecessor company of International Seaways. At the time, Zabrocky was a young chartering executive who would wind up overseeing the tankers taken in from Stelmar.

Zabrocky has been with the company for 31 years now under three different names: it was called Maritime Overseas Corp (MOC) before it became OSG.

We are pretty sure Zabrocky found nothing boring about Tuesday’s session. She seemed a little tense in moderating the meeting as it opened, but grew more relaxed and animated as each successive vote was decided in the management’s favour.

Zabrocky was smiling broadly by the time she spoke with Streetwise afterwards.

“We’re so focused on the future of International Seaways,” she said. “We did a tremendous amount of shareholder interaction leading up to this, and we want to focus on growing the company.”

For now, it appears that shareholder interaction was more effective at the management end than it was on the part of Fredriksen’s Famatown Finance, which controlled 16.8% of shares at last report.

Still, the Fredriksen camp said this in its open letter: “In the coming weeks and months, we will disclose more details regarding our vision for INSW [International Seaways]. We look forward to engaging with our fellow shareholders as we strive for positive change. We remain hopeful that we can reach a reasonable resolution without the need for a future proxy contest.”

So score this round for the management of International Seaways. Status quo, boring even. But it is shipping — so watch this space.

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