Activist investors continue to aggressively exploit a variety of techniques — including hedging, securities borrowing, total return swaps and other contractual arrangements — to avoid public disclosure of their investments and to obtain governance rights out of proportion with their economic stakes. We have long warned against these abuses, which are not confined to the U.S. market but are truly a global phenomenon. Courts, including the Supreme Court of Delaware, have emphasized that corporate voting rights and economic interests should not be “uncoupled” but should travel together. The SEC is considering regulating the use of derivatives in its “proxy plumbing” initiative, and we have encouraged it to focus on “empty voting” abuses.

A recent case in Canada illustrates the problems with the current system. In TELUS Corp. v. CDS Clearing and Depository Services Inc., a U.S.-based hedge fund, Mason Capital, amassed a voting position of almost 20% in TELUS, a Canadian telecommunications provider with a dual-class capitalization. Mason hedged its entire position by shorting TELUS’s non-voting shares. Although Mason was the company’s largest voting shareholder, it would be unaffected whether TELUS shares increased or decreased in value, but rather stood to profit if the price differential between the voting shares and the non-voting shares widened. Mason used its (empty) voting position to defeat TELUS’s plan to collapse its dual class share structure, and sought to call a shareholder meeting to approve resolutions requiring a minimum premium for any conversion of non-voting shares into voting common, which would be advantageous for Mason, but not necessarily for other shareholders whose economic interests are aligned with their voting rights.

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