Yearly Archives: 2013

Second Circuit Orders Argentina to Submit a Payment Proposal

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Antonia Stolper, head of the Capital Markets-Americas group and the Latin America affinity group at Shearman & Sterling LLP, and is based on a Shearman & Sterling client publication by Ms. Stolper, Henry Weisburg, Stephen J. Marzen, and Patrick Clancy.

The Second Circuit has ordered Argentina to submit a payment proposal, following oral argument in the NML v. Argentina appeal.

As we reported in a February 28 note, the three-judge panel of the Second Circuit expressed interest in whether an alternative Ratable Payment formula might be appropriate – one that would provide for equitable payments to the plaintiffs over time but would not amount to a 100% one time payment. At the oral argument, payment proposals made by counsel for both Argentina and the Exchange Bondholders were vague. Following up on those proposals, the panel ordered Argentina’s counsel to state “in writing” “the precise terms” of any “alternative payment formula and schedule to which it is prepared to commit.” The March 1, 2013 order provides in full as follows:

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SEC Enforcement Focusing on Valuation Issues

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Jonathan Polkes, co-chair of the Securities Litigation Practice Group, and Christian Bartholomew, partner in the Securities Litigation and Complex Commercial Litigation practices, both at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. This post is based on a Weil Gotshal alert by Mr. Bartholomew and Jill Baisinger.

Recently, the SEC’s Enforcement Division has brought three matters focused on alleged flaws (and fraud) in connection with valuation issues. Together these actions make clear that the SEC is and will be looking hard at how public companies as well as financial firms make difficult and subjective valuation decisions. Specifically, the SEC will be looking to see whether firms, and individuals, followed proper processes and applied the correct inputs in reaching these judgments. These cases also make clear that, even in times of significant market disruption, firms cannot ignore or substantially discount market inputs in making valuation judgment.

KCAP Financial

In November 2012, the SEC filed and settled In The Matter of KCAP Financial, Inc. This was the first action in which the SEC alleged that a public company had violated the provisions of Financial Accounting Standard (FAS) 157 by failing to properly value certain assets. FAS 157 requires expanded disclosures and incorporates a strong preference for market inputs to determine fair value. According to FAS 157, “[e]ven in times of market dislocation, it is not appropriate to conclude that all market activity represents forced liquidations or distressed sales.”

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SEC Expands Probe into Rule 10b5-1 Plans

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, March 18, 2013
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The following post comes to us from William H. Hinman, Jr. and Daniel N. Webb, partners in the Corporate Department at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. This post is based on a Simpson Thacher memorandum by Mr. Hinman and Mr. Webb.

Recent press stories have revived speculation that corporate insiders may be abusing rule 10b5-1 trading plans to reap unfair profits from inside knowledge of their companies. [1] The SEC is reported to have expanded its probe beyond trades highlighted by the press to cover a larger range of executive trading activity. [2] Other regulators have launched their own investigations, and investor groups have joined the conversation. [3]

In light of this widespread and intensifying scrutiny, companies and executives should consider techniques that make it easier to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of rule 10b5-1, such as:

  • having the first trade under a 10b5-1 plan take place after some reasonable “seasoning period” has passed from the time of adoption of the plan,
  • having each executive use only one 10b5-1 plan at a time, and
  • minimizing terminations and amendments of 10b5-1 plans.

The current controversy centers on trading by executives under 10b5-1 plans that, in hindsight, appears “well-timed.” Much like in the stock option pricing controversy from a few years ago, the press and some analysts have employed a retrospective statistical analysis of 10b5-1 plan trades to argue that insiders using the plans seem to be doing surprisingly well.

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Corporate Law and Economic Stagnation

Posted by June Rhee, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, March 18, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Pavlos E. Masouros, Assistant Professor of Corporate Law at Leiden University.

The book, “Corporate Law and Economic Stagnation: How Shareholder Value and Short-termism Contribute to the Decline of the Western Economies” (Eleven International Publishers, 2013), introduces three hypotheses that put corporate law on the map of the causes of the current economic crisis and introduces a normative legal concept, “Long Governance” that can help take the economy out of the slump. Overall, the author takes a post-Keynesian approach to the theory of the firm and uses political economy analysis to expose corporate law’s contribution to a stagnating economy in the West.

The breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary order in the early 1970s triggered a chain of political, economic and legal events that incrementally brought about “the Great Reversal in Corporate Governance”, i.e. the reorientation of corporate governance from the institutional logic of “retain and invest” to the logic of “downsize and distribute”, and “the Great Reversal in Shareholdership”, i.e. the shortening of the time-horizons of shareholders.

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Court Issues FCPA Rulings Regarding Foreign Business Executives

Posted by Joseph Warin, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, on
Sunday, March 17, 2013
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Joseph Warin is partner and chair of the litigation department at the Washington D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. This post is based on a Gibson Dunn client alert by Seema Gupta and Avi Weitzman.

In the past two weeks, Judges Richard J. Sullivan and Shira A. Scheindlin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York separately issued important rulings in civil Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) cases against foreign executives of non-U.S.-based companies whose stock is traded on a U.S. stock exchange. Their rulings reached opposite results on the issue of the court’s exercise of personal jurisdiction over foreign executives who are alleged to have violated the FCPA. One or both of these rulings could provide the Second Circuit with a rare opportunity to clarify the FCPA’s jurisdictional reach in the context of purely foreign bribery schemes.

SEC v. Straub, __ F. Supp. 2d __, No. 11 Civ. 9645 (RJS) (Feb. 8, 2013) (Sullivan, J.)

In December 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) brought a civil enforcement action against three senior executives of a Hungarian telecommunications company, Magyar Telekom, who allegedly bribed government and political party officials in Macedonia and Montenegro in 2005 and 2006 to win business and shut out competition in the telecommunications industry. The SEC alleges that these executives used sham “consultancy” and “marketing” contracts to pay approximately €4.875 million to Macedonian officials and €7.35 million to Montenegrin officials. The three executives then allegedly caused the bribes to be falsely recorded in Magyar’s books and records, which were consolidated into the books and records of its parent company, Deutsche Telekom AG. Both Magyar and Deutsche Telekom were publicly traded through American Depository Receipts (“ADRs”) on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”). The defendants allegedly made false certifications to Magyar’s auditors, who in turn provided unqualified audit opinions that accompanied the filing of Magyar’s annual reports with the SEC. There was no allegation that any of the negotiations or meetings regarding this scheme occurred within the United States, that the payment of bribes occurred through banks located in the United States, or that the foreign defendants otherwise ever traveled to the United States in furtherance of the bribery scheme.

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Anti-Terrorism Act Liability for Financial Institutions

Posted by Michael M. Wiseman, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, on
Saturday, March 16, 2013
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Michael Wiseman is a managing partner of the Financial Institutions Group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. This post is based on a Sullivan & Cromwell LLP publication.

The past decade has seen a surge in the number of cases brought against financial institutions and other major corporations under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2331 et seq. (“ATA”). Plaintiffs alleging injuries by acts of international terrorism have sought to recover treble damages for their injuries from financial institutions on the theory that the financial institutions supplied, directly or indirectly, financial services to the terrorist groups. The frequency with which such suits are filed is unlikely to diminish, particularly because Congress recently extended the statute of limitations for ATA claims from four to ten years, and in some circumstances even longer. On February 14, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a significant opinion with respect to the ATA’s causation requirements. In Rothstein v. UBS AG, the Court held that the plaintiffs had failed adequately to allege that UBS’s transfers of funds for the government of Iran were the proximate cause of the plaintiffs’ injuries suffered in terrorist attacks by Hamas and Hizbollah in Israel. Rothstein will be an important precedent for financial institutions and other companies in defending themselves against ATA lawsuits.

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Debunking Myths about Activist Investors

Posted by Charles Nathan, RLM Finsbury, on
Friday, March 15, 2013

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Charles Nathan is partner and head of the Corporate Governance Practice at RLM Finsbury. This post is based on an RLM Finsbury commentary by Mr. Nathan.

Activist investing has become quite the rage in the equity marketplace. Activist investors are proliferating, and there is a marked inflow of new capital to this asset class. The discipline of activist investing is popping up in more conversations about the nature and role of equity investors. As a result, it is occupying the thoughts, and sometimes the nightmares, of an increasing number of corporate executives and their advisers. The phenomenon has even become a topic du jour of academics, who are busily finding sufficient economic value in the function of activist investing to justify urging the SEC not to shorten the historic minimum time frames for reporting accumulations of more than 5% of a company’s stock explicitly to permit activists to accumulate larger blocks before disclosure of their activities results in a rise in market trading values for the stock in question.

Activist investing has a long pedigree in the equity markets dating back to the late 1970’s. Back then and throughout the 1980’s, activist investors were known by less flattering sobriquets such as corporate raiders, bust-up artists and worse. Activist investing has changed since those heady, junk bond fueled days. Then, the favorite game plan of activist investing was to threaten or launch a cash tender offer for all, or at least a majority, of the target company’s outstanding stock with funding through an issuance of high yield bonds. Today, activist investors rarely seek equity stakes in target companies above 10%, and their financing comes not from the public debt or equity markets but rather through private hedge funds that they sponsor and manage.

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Delaware Court Raises Bar for Use of “Poison Put” Provisions

Posted by David A. Katz, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Friday, March 15, 2013
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David A. Katz is a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in the areas of mergers and acquisitions and complex securities transactions. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Katz, Igor Kirman and Ryan A. McLeod. 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. Further reading about Kallick v. SandRidge Energy, Inc. is available here.

In a recent case that arose in the context of a consent solicitation seeking a change of control of a public company, the Delaware Court of Chancery found the target board in breach of its fiduciary duties for not approving a dissident slate for the purposes of preventing a change-of-control-triggered put right in the company’s debt agreements. Kallick v. SandRidge Energy, Inc., C.A. No. 8182-CS (Del. Ch. Mar. 8, 2013). Chancellor Strine’s ruling extends prior Delaware law on the topic and provides cautionary guidance about the future effectiveness of such clauses, which are common features of debt documents and other commercial arrangements.

The case arose out of a hedge fund’s efforts to destagger and replace a majority of the board of directors of SandRidge Energy via a consent solicitation. In opposing the consent solicitation, the company initially warned shareholders that a change in the majority of the board that was not approved by the company’s directors would obligate the company to offer to repurchase $4.3 billion of debt at 101% of par pursuant to certain provisions in its debt instruments—provisions sometimes called “poison puts” or “proxy puts.” The company subsequently changed its public posture and noted that the put was “unlikely” to be harmful, because the debt was then trading above par, making it doubtful that the put would be exercised. However, the board failed to decide whether to “approve” the dissident nominees for purposes of the debt documents, thus leaving a cloud of uncertainty regarding the put and drawing a legal challenge from a shareholder.

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Bias and Efficiency: Comparison of Analyst Forecasts and Management Forecasts

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, March 15, 2013
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The following post comes to us from Urooj Khan, Oded Rozenbaum, and Gil Sadka, all of the Accounting Division at Columbia Business School.

In our paper, Bias and Efficiency: A Comparison of Analyst Forecasts and Management Forecasts, we compare the forecast characteristics of analyst forecasts and management forecasts. Frequently, analysts and managers provide similar type of information to investors, namely forecasts. Since managers and analysts have different incentives and different information sets, we empirically test whether those differences are manifested in their forecast characteristics. Specifically, we compare the bias, a systematic deviation of management and analyst EPS forecasts from the actual realized EPS, and efficiency, the ability of managers and analysts to incorporate prior publicly available information in their forecasts.

When comparing management forecasts and analyst forecasts, it is important to consider the implications of the difference in incentives and information available to analysts and managers. Since prior literature documents an optimistic bias in analyst forecasts, we expect that, given management incentives and cognitive biases, management forecasts will be at least as biased as analyst forecasts. In addition, since companies’ managers are exposed to private information, we expect management forecasts to better incorporate prior available information.

We find several striking results. First, we find that prior stock returns do not predict management forecast errors while they predict analyst forecast errors. Furthermore, while we find an optimistic bias in a broad sample of both management forecasts and analyst forecasts, the optimistic bias in analyst forecasts disappears in months in which management forecasts are issued. The bias is still apparent for these firms when managers do not provide forecasts.

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Substantial 2013 Results Already Produced by SRP and SRP-Represented Investors

Posted by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance & Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, March 14, 2013
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Editor’s Note: Lucian Bebchuk is the Director of the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP), Scott Hirst is the SRP’s Associate Director, and June Rhee is the SRP’s Counsel. The SRP, a clinical program operating at Harvard Law School, works on behalf of public pension funds and charitable organizations seeking to improve corporate governance at publicly traded companies, as well as on research and policy projects related to corporate governance. Any views expressed and positions taken by the SRP and its representatives should be attributed solely to the SRP and not to Harvard Law School or Harvard University. The work of the SRP has been discussed in other posts on the Forum available here.

In its news alert released yesterday, the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP), working on behalf of eight SRP-represented investors, announced that proposals submitted for 2013 meetings have already had significant impact. As discussed below, major results obtained so far include the following:

  • Following active engagement, 46 S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies that received shareholder proposals for 2013 annual meetings have already agreed to move towards annual elections.
  • These 46 companies represent more than 60% of the companies receiving shareholder proposals from SRP-represented investors for the 2013 proxy season.
  • Together with the 2012 work of the SRP, 91 companies — about three-quarters of the S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies that received proposals in 2012, 2013 or both — have agreed to move towards annual elections. The aggregate market capitalization of these 91 companies exceeded one trillion dollars as of March 1, 2013.

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