QUOTE (toturi @ Sep 20 2013, 04:29 AM)

It occurs to me that the Big D must have had enough stock in both Ares and Fuchi for Vogel and Lanier to get board seats. Did Dunkie have any stock in Aztech?
The text of Dunkelzahn's will only mentions giving Arthur Vogel "his" seat on Ares Macrotechnology board (which suggest Dunkelzahn did take part in Ares board meeting, or at least could), and does not mention any number of shares. However, based on the numbers given in
Corporate Shadowfiles and
Corporate Download, he may have only have had 1 or 2% of Ares stock before buying Leonard Aurelius' shares. Another 12% were owned by Dunkelzahn through Gavilan Ventures, which was the only asset actually bequeathed to Nadja Daviar (she only got to manage the rest as chairman of the Draco Foundation).
Miles Lanier inherited 4 million shares in Renraku Computer Systems, not Fuchi, and a seat that the share "entitles" him to. The books suggest it represents less than 10%.
Dunkelzahn also owned some shares in Fuchi Industrial Electronics, which he let to Richard Villiers. Based on
Corporate Shadowfiles, that would have been less than 3% (3% being the grand total of what wasn't already owned by Villiers, Nakatomi and Yamana).
Finally, Dunkelzahn left Oliver McLure shares and a board seat to which they entitles to.
In real life, the only threshold that can guarantee a seat on the board of directors is half the stock, which actually guarantees you in most case
all the seats. However, corporate management is also more complicated and require more diplomacy in real life that Shadowrun makes it to be (especially because the shareholders of large corporations rarely own slice as large they do in SR).
In most RL corporations, only the board of directors itself that can propose or validate candidates for the board (establishing a
de facto lockdown). In some cases, the company and one or several shareholders pass a "shareholder agreement" that give the shareholder the power to "pre-propose" candidate that the board must validate. But only the general assembly of shareholders retains the power to elect those candidates to the board. So usually the major shareholders also agree beforehand to vote for each other candidates.
In real life, board seats are also physically nominal. You actually cannot give or bequeath them (unlike shareholder agreement, which has contract can possibly be transmitted to someone else). It also means that corporations cannot get a seat by themselves: they must designate a physical person. Having a proxy elected can be risky: the shareholder who supported him cannot "fire" him once he's elected to the board, he has to wait for his term to end (or pressure him into resigning, or the board into altering the election schedule to his term earlier, indeed).