There’s so much wrong with this post...
because capitalism has funded Abromavich and the Qataris’ takeovers of English clubs?
the vast majority of the club’s shares are held by Glazer affiliates, voting rights were always inconsequential as a result. The club just lost WKSI status because the public float (public shares held by non affiliates are valued <$700m). If you take the valuation of the club and do some basic math, you’ll see that the public shares represent far less than anything close to a majority, and when the majority is owned by a single group of affiliates, you shouldn’t buy shares if you have an issue with that. Securities laws are pretty clear about disclosure requirements for affiliate ownership. If you buy Man Utd expecting your vote to count, you’re a fool and didn’t do your diligence and read publicly available disclosure document to investors.
all that said, those shares do provide economic rights. Issuing primary shares in the public entity decreases the Glazers’ economic interest (which, to an average investor, is far more important than voting rights - especially if you research before investing and realize that this is a controlled company and your vote never mattered anyway...) every time the Glazers issue primary shares (which frankly, I’m not sure they’ve done, they’ve sold their own (secondary sales), but they bought those for their actual value and are well within their rights to sell the shares they own) they dilute their shares and their rights. Dividends have to be distributed equitably across the class of equity securities. So if they sell their own shares, they lose the dividends on those. If they issue new primary shares, the dividends on their shares are decreased because of the dilution.
I’m tired of the Glazers too, but this is an uninformed post.
edit: oh, about the leveraged buyout, this is how business works, unless you’re from a communist or autocratic country where you make your fortune on the bodies of migrant (slave) workers or strict autocratic socialism where a few families benefit from state ownership (see Qatar).
put me in the category that would prefer an owner that conducted a leveraged buyout over an autocrat that profits off of state ownership (corruption) or slavery. That said, the Glazers are shit owners no matter how they made their money.
edit again: I’m not even going to get in to your ridiculous notion about redemption rights on those shares u til you’ve actually read the prospectuses that describe the right of the holder of those shares. Go look that prospectus up and show me where it says they can be forcibly repurchased. Are you confusing equity securities with debt securities (the latter always having a repurchase/redemption right that’s disclosed in the prospectus and registration statement for said securities?)