A spokeswoman for the public prosecutor's office said the inquiry was part of the legal process of gathering evidence for the shareholder complaint.

Tenet took some steps to head off shareholder complaints.

At Borden, the board finally appears to be listening to shareholder complaints about years of stagnant revenues and earnings, but the solutions are far more elusive.

The committee reported back to the full board and the commission on Friday that it had found improprieties involving payments other than the ones that had touched off shareholder complaints.

Increasingly, though, shareholder complaints about investment issues are being heard behind the scenes, typically after a letter or call from an influential investor.

Many compromises are reached even before shareholder complaints get to the proposal stage, with little, if any, public discussion.

Mr. Frazee predicted approval based on the number of proxies management had received after its six-month struggle to quiet shareholder complaints, though he declined to provide any figures.

The court blocked the original deal in response to shareholder complaints that Schneider's bid, which valued the preferred shares at a 43 percent discount to the ordinary shares, was unfair.

The idea is to separate the pharmaceutical and agricultural divisions, partly because of shareholder complaints that the agricultural division is dragging down the stock price of Monsanto.

In settling the class-action shareholder complaint, Mr. Dunlap did not admit any wrongdoing, his lawyer, Donald Zakarin, said yesterday.