Yahoo shareholder vote challenges board

"Even using the company's valuation, Semel's overall compensation would remain far above that of peers, or for that matter, far above almost any executive at any publicly owned company," Proxy Governance said in an analysis issued in May.

Proposals for Yahoo to adopt an anti-censorship policy on the Internet and for its board to establish a human rights committee to review the implications of its policies in the world, specifically China, were overwhelmingly defeated.

Yahoo has been heavily criticized by human rights groups since 2005 for its role in turning over some political dissidents' e-mails to police in China that were used to prosecute and imprison them.

The company maintains it must comply with the local laws of any country it operates in and that it was unaware how the information it provided to Chinese authorities would be used.

In preliminary tallies, the censorship proposal received 15.2 percent of the votes in favor and 71.4 percent against. The human rights committee had only 4.1 percent in favor and 81.1 percent against, the vote overseer said.