­Shareholders at Canada's Telus have voted in favour of a proposal to simplify the share structure and see the company's shares listed on the New York stock exchange.

The proposal had been objected to by the US hedge fund, Mason Capital which had argued that the preferential shares were being merged with basic shares and no premium was being offered to reflect the different values of the shares.

Once final votes were tallied, 81.1 percent of total shares voted were in favour of Telus' share exchange proposal. 62.9 percent of the common shares voted were in favour, and 99.5 percent of the non-voting shares voted were in favour.

As such, the voting results easily exceeded the approval thresholds for the proposal to pass, namely a simple majority of common shares voted and two-thirds of non-voting shares voted. Notably, excluding Mason's most recently reported voting block, 93.0 per cent of total shares voted were in favour of the exchange.

Darren Entwistle, Telus President and CEO commented: "Shareholders made clear their desire to enhance shareholder value through improved trading liquidity and augment Telus' already excellent corporate governance by adopting a single class of widely held voting shares. Fundamental Telus investor views dominated, prevailing over a self-serving hedge fund engaging in a troubling empty voting trading strategy, negative publicity campaign and multiple court challenges to try to defeat this proposal for their own profit."

Telus has two classes of shares as a legacy of its former merger between BC Telecom and Telus Alberta, some of which offer voting rights and another class which doesn't permit votes at shareholder meetings.

The decision to create two classes of shares was to get around Canadian rules limiting foreign stakes in local telecoms companies, and at the time, USA based Verizon owned a sizeable stake in the merged company. Verizon (GTE as it was then) has since sold its stake.

The proposal was to merge the two classes of shares into a single category.

However, the proposal merged the shares at equal value, and Mason Capital had argued that voting shares are worth more - and the proposal should reflect that.

The other shareholders disagreed.