Capital Research wants Yahoo vote probe

The headquarters of Yahoo Inc. is pictured in Sunnyvale, California, May 5, 2008. Yahoo Inc's board of directors won strong backing from shareholders at its annual meeting on Friday, with Jerry Yang, the company's embattled CEO, receiving 85 percent of the vote in his favor.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - One of Yahoo Inc's largest and most critical shareholders, Capital Research Global Investors, said on Monday it had asked for a probe of last week's shareholder vote which showed strong support for Chief Executive Jerry Yang.

Yang has been under pressure for months over failed negotiations to sell the company to Microsoft Corp and questions about Yang's leadership, but last Friday's shareholder vote appeared to show strong support for him and his team.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the questions over the vote, said that Capital Research believed there should have been more opposition logged for Yang, who received 85 percent support in the results announced on Friday.

Investors holding nearly 76 percent of Yahoo's 1.38 billion shares gave solid support for all nine directors, with the lowest level of support at 78 percent.

Yahoo said in a statement that it was not party to any errors that may have been made in the vote.

Capital Research Global Investors Portfolio Manager Gordon Crawford in May had said he was "extremely angry" at Yang in the course of the negotiations with Microsoft.

(Reporting by Anupreeta Das and Eric Auchard; editing by Carol Bishopric, Jeffrey Benkoe, Toni Reinhold)