Yearly Archives: 2013

Compensation Committee and Adviser Implementation Begins July 1, 2013

Posted by David L. Caplan and Richard J. Sandler, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, on
Saturday, May 18, 2013
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Richard J. Sandler is a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and co-head of the firm’s global corporate governance group, and David L. Caplan is a partner and global co-head of the firm’s mergers and acquisitions practice. This post is based on a Davis Polk client memorandum.

As discussed in our previous memo, in January 2013, the SEC approved amendments to the NYSE and Nasdaq listing standards relating to compensation committees and their advisers. Unless they have already done so, companies should begin implementing the new requirements with respect to compensation committees and their advisers that take effect on July 1, 2013. Compensation committee action is required in order to comply with these requirements.

Companies should note that, while the new rules require compensation committees to consider the independence of their advisers, the rules do not require that such advisers be independent, nor is any aspect of the mandated independence review required to be disclosed publicly (other than proxy disclosure concerning compensation consultants to a company or its compensation committee).

Companies should also note that this independent assessment applies only to advisers; there will be a separate independence assessment of directors required later, as noted below.

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For Dimon and Board Leaders: Function Matters, Not Form

Posted by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance & Financial Regulation, on
Friday, May 17, 2013
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Editor’s Note: Ben W. Heineman, Jr. is a former GE senior vice president for law and public affairs and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s schools of law and government. This post is based on an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review online.

One of the dumbest corporate governance issues is whether to split the roles of Board Chair and CEO. That debate is now playing out on the front pages of business sections (print and online) as shareholders will decide next week in a nonbinding vote whether to take the chairman of the board title away from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

This is a reprise, for the zillionth time, of the pointless push by governance types to call the senior director “chairman of the board” rather than “lead” or “presiding” director and to deny the CEO the chairman of the board title. (Dimon, of course, is today Chairman of the Board and CEO of JP Morgan; Lee Raymond is JPM’s “lead” director.)

What is lost in virtually all stories and commentary hyping the Dimon election is an answer to the basic question: what is the function of the lead director? It is this issue of function, not form (i.e., what title that senior director carries), which is crucial.

It has been a governance verity, if not always a reality, that a strong board should provide oversight and constructive criticism to the CEO and other company leaders.

Since Enron, this basic principle has been implemented in most companies by designating one director to be first among equals, whatever her title. That director performs at least the following core roles (as I have discussed in detail elsewhere):

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Basel Developments: Credit Risk Mitigation Transactions and Regulatory Capital Arbitrage

Posted by Barnabas Reynolds, Shearman & Sterling, on
Friday, May 17, 2013
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Barnabas Reynolds is head of the global Financial Institutions Advisory & Financial Regulatory Group at Shearman & Sterling LLP. This post is based on a Shearman & Sterling client publication by Mr. Reynolds, Donald Lamson, David Portilla and Azad Ali.

Transactions that reduce regulatory capital requirements for banks have recently come under media and regulatory scrutiny. The New York Times characterized them as a “trading sleight of hand.” The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has proposed limiting the ways in which capital requirements can be reduced by such transactions. This post discusses the new Basel proposals in light of prior guidance published by Basel and the Federal Reserve. As banks seek ways to meet heightened capital requirements and surcharges that are being implemented, they may find greater difficulties in reducing their exposures.

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Audit Committee Elections

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, May 17, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Ronen Gal-Or and Udi Hoitash, both of the Accounting Group at Northeastern University, and Rani Hoitash of the Department of Accountancy at Bentley University.

In our paper, Audit Committee Elections, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether and in what ways shareholder votes in the elections of directors who sit on the audit committee (AC) are associated with the effectiveness of the audit committee. Within the board, the audit committee is responsible for monitoring the financial reporting process. This process involves oversight over the external auditor, internal controls and overall quality of the financial reports. Aside from voting in director elections, shareholders can do very little to influence or signal their satisfaction to the AC. Yet, research examining director elections does not generally focus on the AC. In this study we aim to fill this void.

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Appraisal Rights — The Next Frontier in Deal Litigation?

Posted by Daniel E. Wolf, Kirkland & Ellis LLP, on
Thursday, May 16, 2013
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Daniel Wolf is a partner at Kirkland & Ellis focusing on mergers and acquisitions. The following post is based on a Kirkland memorandum by Mr. Wolf, Matthew Solum, Joshua M. Zachariah, and David B. Feirstein. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

Appraisal, or dissenters’, rights, long an M&A afterthought, have recently attracted more attention from deal-makers as a result of a number of largely unrelated factors. By way of brief review, appraisal rights are a statutory remedy available to objecting stockholders in certain extraordinary transactions. While the details vary by state (often meaningfully), in Delaware the most common application is in a cash-out merger (including a back-end merger following a tender offer), where dissenting stockholders can petition the Chancery Court for an independent determination of the “fair value” of their stake as an alternative to accepting the offered deal price. The statute mandates that both the petitioning stockholder and the company comply with strict procedural requirements, and the process is usually expensive (often costing millions) and lengthy (often taking years). At the end of the proceedings, the court will determine the fair value of the subject shares (i.e., only those for which appraisal has been sought), with the awarded amount potentially being lower or higher than the deal price received by the balance of the stockholders.

While deal counsel have always addressed the theoretical applicability of appraisal rights where relevant, a number of developments in recent years have contributed to these rights becoming a potential new frontier in deal risk and litigation:

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Sovereign Debt, Government Myopia, and the Financial Sector

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, May 16, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Viral Acharya, Professor of Finance at New York University, and Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago.

Why do governments repay external sovereign borrowing? This is a question that has been central to discussions of sovereign debt capacity, yet the answer is still being debated. Models where countries service their external debt for fear of being excluded from capital markets for a sustained period (or some other form of harsh punishment such as trade sanctions or invasion) seem very persuasive, yet are at odds with the fact that defaulters seem to be able to return to borrowing in international capital markets after a short while. With sovereign debt around the world at extremely high levels, understanding why sovereigns repay foreign creditors, and what their debt capacity might be, is an important concern for policy makers and investors. In our paper, Sovereign Debt, Government Myopia, and the Financial Sector, forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, we attempt to address these issues.

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Examining the Application of Title I of the Dodd-Frank Act

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
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The following post comes to us from James R. Wigand, Director, Office of Complex Financial Institutions at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and is based on Director Wigand’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, available here.

Chairman McHenry, Ranking Member Green, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on Sections 165 and 121 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act). Our testimony will focus on the FDIC’s role and progress in implementing Section 165, including the resolution plan requirements and the requirements for stress testing by certain financial institutions.

Section 165 of the Dodd-Frank Act

Resolution Plans

Under the Dodd-Frank Act, bankruptcy is the preferred resolution framework in the event of a systemic financial company’s failure. To make this prospect achievable, Title I of the Dodd-Frank Act requires that all large, systemic financial companies prepare resolution plans, or “living wills”, to demonstrate how the company would be resolved in a rapid and orderly manner under the Bankruptcy Code in the event of the company’s material financial distress or failure. This requirement enables both the firm and the firm’s regulators to understand and address the parts of the business that could create systemic consequences in a bankruptcy.

The FDIC intends to make the living will process under Title I of the Dodd-Frank Act both timely and meaningful. The living will process is a necessary and significant tool in ensuring that large financial institutions can be resolved through the bankruptcy system.

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Fiduciary Obligations of Financial Advisors Under the Law of Agency

Posted by Robert Sitkoff, Harvard Law School, on
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
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Robert H. Sitkoff is the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Regardless of whether a financial advisor is an “investment advisor” or a “broker” or neither under federal securities laws, the advisor might be an agent of the client under the common law of agency. If so, then as a matter of state law the advisor is a fiduciary who will be subject to liability for breach of any of several fiduciary duties to the client. In a recent paper sponsored by Federated Investors that is available for download here, I examine the fiduciary obligations of financial advisors who are agents under the common law of agency. The paper draws on earlier work on the economic structure of fiduciary law.

The debate about whether to impose a harmonized federal fiduciary standard of conduct on investment advisors and brokers notwithstanding, a financial advisor who is an agent under state agency law is subject to fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, and a host of subsidiary rules that reinforce and give meaning to the broad standards of loyalty and care as applied to specific circumstances. In the event of the advisor’s breach of duty, the client will be entitled to an election among remedies that include compensatory damages to offset losses incurred or to make up gains forgone owing to the breach; disgorgement by the advisor of any profit accruing from the breach or compensation paid by the client; or punitive damages. A financial advisor who ignores the possibility of fiduciary status under state agency law acts at his peril.

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Preparing for Challenges and Opportunities

Posted by Luis A. Aguilar, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
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Luis A. Aguilar is a Commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Commissioner Aguilar’s commencement address at Georgia Southern University, which is available here. The views expressed in the post are those of Commissioner Aguilar and do not necessarily reflect those of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the other Commissioners, or the Staff.

I am sure many of you are looking forward to your well-earned celebrations after today’s commencement exercises, so I will heed the advice that President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to speechmakers: “Be sincere, be brief and be seated.”

Perhaps the most challenging part of delivering a commencement speech is the realization that whatever one says will soon be forgotten. Frankly, my memory of the commencement speech at my own graduation is a bit hazy. So today I will ask you to remember just two things: First, the challenges you will face in life – and there will be many – are just new opportunities to learn and further your education. And second, it is always better to do the right thing, even if that may seem the harder choice.

Commencement is a good time for looking back, as well as for looking forward. When I graduated from Georgia Southern during the last century – well, 1976 – our school was called Georgia Southern College. The school only had about 6,000 students, mostly from the Southeast, and there was no football team. Today, Georgia Southern is a major university with more than 20,000 students coming from almost all 50 states and over 80 countries. And the Eagles will soon be dominating the Sun-Belt Conference.

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Statistics on CEO Succession in the S&P 500

Posted by Matteo Tonello, The Conference Board, on
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
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Matteo Tonello is Managing Director at The Conference Board, Inc. This post relates to a Conference Board report led by Dr. Tonello, Jason D Schloetzer of Georgetown University, and Melissa Aguilar of The Conference Board. For details regarding how to obtain a copy of the report, contact [email protected].

In our study, CEO Succession Practices (2013 Edition), which The Conference Board recently released, we document and analyze 2012 cases of CEO turnover at S&P 500 companies. The study is organized in four parts.

Part I: CEO Succession Trends (2000-2012) illustrates year-by-year succession rates and examines specific aspects of the succession phenomenon, including the influence on firm performance on succession and the characteristics of the departing and incoming CEOs.

Part II: CEO Succession Practices (2012) details where boards assign responsibilities on leadership development, the role performed within the board by the retired CEO, and the extent of the disclosure to shareholders on these matters.

Part III: Notable Cases of CEO Succession (2012) includes summaries of 11 episodes of CEO succession that made headlines in the past two years and that were carefully chosen to highlight key circumstances of the process.

Part IV: Shareholder Activism on CEO Succession Planning (2012) reviews examples of companies that have recently faced shareholder pressure in this area.

The following are some of the major findings discussed in the study:

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