Shareholders at Harland & Wolff's annual general meeting voted unanimously last night to accept the company's restructuring plans. H&W's management hopes that the new corporate structure will help it tender more effectively for new shipbuilding business.

The revised structure will see the creation of a new holding company called Harland & Wolff Group and a new sub-division called Harland & Wolff Heavy Industries. The changes also involve a rights issue, needed to inject new funding into the group.

A spokesman for H&W last night described the a.g.m. as a "calm, positive and constructive" meeting. The 80 or so shareholders present had unanimously agreed a share for share exchange giving the company "the basis on which to move forward". Despite the fact that most of the yard's shareholders were employees the issue of more stringent terms and conditions of work was not raised, he added.

The structural changes, which H&W hopes to have in place by the summer, are aimed at removing the uncertainty prospective customers currently face about the financial stability of the company's shipbuilding operation because of the unresolved dispute with the US oil drilling company Global Marine.

In effect, the new structure is intended to ring-fence the potential debt of £133.2 million sterling which could result from the Global Marine claim and remove the threat of liquidation from any new company.

In a statement to shareholders last month, the yard's chairman, Mr Fred Olsen, said the company needed a new financial platform, a new organisation and an injection of new money to create new opportunities. The move from H&W Holdings to H&W Group would deliver those opportunities. Critics, however, have voiced fears that the move could be part of a plan to cut the cost of scaling down the yard and transfer resources from shipbuilding into property development in the newly created Titanic Quarter. It is hoped that the restructuring plan will further cement the yard's future which looked bleak two months ago, when the 1,800 employees were put on 90-day protective redundancy notices and the company lost out on a multimillion pound deal to build the Queen Mary II.

Last week, however, H&W secured a £300 million contract to build four roll-on, rolloff passenger vessels for a Bahamas-based company, Seamasters International.