Shareholder activist and multi-time U.S. Senate candidate Robert Augustus Gardner Monks, known as Robert A.G. Monks, died on April 29 at his home in Cape Elizabeth.
He was 91 and died of pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed a week earlier, his son told the New York Times.
A Massachusetts native, Monks was born into generational wealth, earned a law degree at Harvard in 1958 and became a successful businessman and wealth fund manager, who made millions selling coal and oil refineries in 1970.
In Maine from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, he was president of the C. H. Sprague & Sons Co., served as director of the Maine Office of Energy Resources, and tried to develop a deep-water oil terminal in Machiasport.
He ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate three times in Maine, losing to Sen. Margaret Chase Smith in the 1972 primary, Sen. Edward Muskie in the general election of 1976, and current Sen. Susan Collins in the 1996 primary. In 1977 he was briefly chairman of the Maine Republican Party.
Monks was appointed by the Reagan administration to administer the Labor Department’s pension program, reportedly on the merits of his political donations.
His legacy, however, was largely built in his late career, when he abruptly turned to shareholder activism in an attempt to force accountability from corporations like those whose profits underpinned his own wealth.
He co-founded Institutional Shareholder Services, a leading corporate advisory firm on corporate governance, and contributed to the separation in corporations of the CEO and chairman positions, which had conferred power to a single person that he likened to the power of an emperor.
In a statement released after Monks’ death, ISS called him “a staunch and unrelenting advocate for, and protector of, the voice of shareholders.”
In her 1999 biography “A Traitor to His Class,” Hilary Rosenberg wrote: “What Monks is trying to do is to make the point — one case at a time — that companies need to be accountable to someone and that someone must be its shareholders.
“Since increasingly those shareholders are big institutional investors such as pension funds and mutual funds that represent millions of citizens with long-term goals, accountability to owners becomes, in his view, the same thing as accountability to society.”
