The following post comes to us from David J. Billington, partner focusing on international financing transactions and restructuring transactions at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. This post is based on a Cleary Gottlieb memorandum; the full text, including footnotes and appendices, is available here.
Exit consents are often used as a restructuring tool by issuers of bonds. Issuers invite bondholders to exchange their existing bonds for new bonds (usually with a lower principal amount). In order to participate in the exchange, bondholders must agree to vote in favour of a resolution that amends the terms of the existing bonds so as to negatively affect (or, in Assénagon, [1] substantially destroy) their value. This is referred to as ‘covenant-stripping’. If the issuer does not achieve the majority needed to pass the resolution, the covenant-strip and the exchange do not happen. But if the resolution is passed, each participating holder’s bonds are exchanged for the new bonds, and the terms of the old bonds are amended to remove most of the protective covenants. This incentivises bondholders to participate in the exchange: accepting the new bonds (even though they will usually have a lower face amount than the existing bonds) may be preferable to being ‘left behind’ in the old bonds, which will cease to have any meaningful covenant protection.
Facts of the case
Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Limited (the “Bank”) suffered severe financial difficulties as a result of the financial crisis, and was nationalised in January 2009. As part of its restructuring, the Bank proposed an exchange offer whereby:
SEC Comment Letter: Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending
More from: Lucian Bebchuk, Robert Jackson
Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Associate Professor of Law and Milton Handler Fellow at Columbia Law School. Bebchuk and Jackson served as co-chairs of the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, which filed a rulemaking petition requesting that the SEC require all public companies to disclose their political spending, discussed on the Forum here. Bebchuk and Jackson are also co-authors of Corporate Political Speech: Who Decides? and Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, coming out this month in the Georgetown Law Journal. This post is based on a comment letter that Bebchuk and Jackson filed with the SEC in further support of the rulemaking petition. The comment letter, available here, submitted Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending for SEC consideration and is largely based on it.
We recently submitted a comment letter in connection with a rulemaking petition, currently before the SEC, urging the development of rules to require public companies to disclose the use of corporate resources for political activities. The Petition was submitted by the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, a group of ten corporate and securities law experts that we co-chaired. In further support of the rules advocated by the Petition, our comment letter submitted for consideration by the SEC our Article Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, which was published recently in the Georgetown Law Journal.
The submitted Article puts forth a comprehensive, empirically-grounded case for the rules advocated in the Petition. The Article also provides a detailed response to each of the ten objections that have been raised by the Petition’s opponents, either in the comment file or elsewhere. The Article shows that none of these objections, either individually or collectively, provides a basis for opposing rules requiring public companies to disclose political spending.
The main part of our comment letter discusses and reviews the analysis in the attached article as follows:
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