Voting Trust

See: Voting Shares.

Companies are owned by their shareholders. Oftentimes, shareholders (especially in public companies) have very little stake in the firm. You can own a million shares of a large company and still only possess a fractional percent of the outstanding number. It makes it difficult to hold any sway over company decisions. A voting trust attempts to pool influence, giving its participants more leverage to control company decisions.

To create this structure, shareholders will donate their shares to a trust. That trust then becomes the holder of all their shares, able to vote them as a block. The trust itself (owning a bunch of shares from many different shareholders) has much more influence over the company. Meanwhile, the former shareholders are granted voting power within the trust.

So...you own 5% of a company's stock. You donate that to a voting trust with four other shareholders with a similarly sized interest. Now, instead of owning 5% of the public company, you hold a 20% stake in a trust that owns 25% of the company. The added power the shares get from voting in a block gives you more influence in the company than you had previously.