Conservative McDonald's shareholders push for Bitcoin treasury plan, but SEC says company can dismiss proposal

Conservative McDonald's shareholders wanted the fast-food chain to consider buying Bitcoin, but according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company doesn't have any interest in discussing such a proposal.

The whole matter started when the National Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank and McDonald's shareholder, sent a letter to the famous burger chain urging leadership to buy Bitcoin.

"McDonald’s is widely considered – including by former CFO and President Harry Sonneborn – a real estate company that happens to sell burgers," the National Center for Public Policy said in its proposal letter . "Real estate has been a much more reliable store of value than cash and bonds, but won’t appreciate over time nearly as much as Bitcoin will and it’s not liquid like Bitcoin is. As more and more companies add Bitcoin to their balance sheets, if McDonald’s doesn’t follow suit, it will fall behind where it once led."

This is not the first time that a corporation has been asked by its shareholders to begin acquiring bitcoin. Michael Saylor's tech company Strategy made the stockpiling of Bitcoin fashionable as its constant buying of the digital asset, and the appreciating value of the cryptocurrency, has caused the company's treasury to grow substantially. While recently the video game retailer GameStop said it had raised $1.5 billion to buy Bitcoin, last December, Microsoft shareholders voted against such a move.

Companies began mulling buying bitcoin after U.S. President Donald Trump's victory last November helped drive the price of BTC to an all-time high.

SEC picks a side

After receiving the Bitcoin acquisition proposal, McDonald's legal representatives sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seeking confirmation that the regulator's Division of Corporation Finance would not "recommend any enforcement action" if the fast-food chain avoided publicly discussing the idea at the upcoming annual shareholders' meeting in May.

The SEC appeared to agree that McDonald's was within its rights to refuse to discuss the proposal at the annual meeting.

"There appears to be some basis for your view that the company may exclude the proposal," the agency responded in a letter dated March 28. "In our view, the proposal relates to the company’s ordinary business operations. Accordingly, we will not recommend enforcement action to the commission if the company omits the proposal from its proxy materials in reliance."