Robert AG Monks, who has died aged 91, was the inspirational founding father of American shareholder activism, an accomplished lawyer, prolific writer and successful businessman. With Nell Minow, his long-standing business partner and co-author, he helped power the take-off in the 1980s of the corporate governance movement.
Monks was a Republican who ran three times, unsuccessfully, for the US Senate. He liked to remind people that it was while running for office that he came to understand the critical importance of institutional shareholders in democracy. As a result of heavy pollution in a river close to his home in Maine, he realised that corporations overwhelmingly determined the quality of the air we breathed and the quality of the water we drank. Yet, they were not properly accountable to owners.