Yearly Archives: 2014

Span of Control and Span of Attention

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Oriana Bandiera, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); Andrea Prat, Professor of Economics at Columbia Business School; and Raffaella Sadun and Julie Wulf, both of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School.

In our paper, Span of Control and Span of Attention, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we use novel data to better understand the role of the CEO and the relationship to the executive team as represented by the CEO’s span of control. We collect detailed time use information for a large sample of CEOs and use it to characterize how CEOs allocate their time. We compare how this new and more comprehensive measure—span of attention—is related to the more traditional notion of span of control.

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Schedule 13D Ten-Day Window and Other Issues: Will the Pershing Square/Valeant Accumulation of a 9.7% Stake in Allergan Lead to Regulatory Action?

Posted by Victor Lewkow, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, on
Monday, April 28, 2014
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Victor Lewkow is a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. This post is based on a Cleary Gottlieb memorandum by Mr. Lewkow and Christopher Austin that was issued on April 24, 2014.

As widely reported, a vehicle formed by Pershing Square and Valeant Pharmaceuticals acquired just under 5% of Allergan’s shares after Allergan apparently rebuffed confidential efforts by Valeant to get Allergan to negotiate a potential acquisition. The Pershing Square/Valeant vehicle then crossed the 5% threshold and nearly doubled its stake (to 9.7%) over the next ten days, at which point it made the required Schedule 13D disclosures regarding the accumulation and Valeant’s plans to publicly propose an acquisition of Allergan. The acquisition program has raised a number of questions.

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US G-SIB Leverage Surcharge and Basel III Leverage Ratio

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, April 28, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Luigi L. De Ghenghi and Andrew S. Fei, attorneys in the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and is based on a Davis Polk client memorandum; the full publication, including visuals, tables, and flowcharts, is available here.

The U.S. banking agencies have finalized higher leverage capital standards for the eight U.S. bank holding companies that have been identified as global systemically important banks (“U.S. G-SIBs”) and their insured depository institution (“IDI”) subsidiaries. The agencies also proposed important changes to the denominator of the U.S. Basel III supplementary leverage ratio (“SLR”). A number of these proposed changes are intended to implement the Basel Committee’s January 2014 revisions to the Basel III leverage ratio.

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Council of Institutional Investors Presses SEC for Guidance on Interim Vote Tallies

Posted by Amy Goodman, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, on
Sunday, April 27, 2014
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Amy Goodman is a partner and co-chair of the Securities Regulation and Corporate Governance practice group at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. The following post is based on a Gibson Dunn alert by Ms. Goodman, Elizabeth A. Ising, and James Moloney.

Last May, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc., the provider of proxy services for over 90% of public companies and mutual funds in North America (“Broadridge”), decided to end its established practice of providing interim vote tallies (sometimes referred to as “preliminary voting results”) to proponents of shareholder proposals. Following this change in practice, the Council of Institutional Investors (“CII”) sent a letter to the SEC asking the Commission to reverse Broadridge’s change in practice. Later in July, Broadridge reviewed its decision, promising to “continue to monitor developments on th[e] issue” and noting that it is contractually obligated to follow client directions regarding release of interim vote tallies.

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A New Takeover Threat: Symbiotic Activism

Posted by Trevor Norwitz, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Friday, April 25, 2014
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Trevor Norwitz is a partner in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he focuses on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and securities law matters. The following post is based on a Wachtell Lipton firm memorandum by Martin Lipton, Adam O. Emmerich, Mr. Norwitz, and Sabastian V. Niles.

The Pershing Square-Valeant hostile bid for Allergan has captured the imagination. Other companies are wondering whether they too will wake up one morning to find a raider-activist tag-team wielding a stealth block of their stock. Serial acquirers are asking whether they should be looking to take advantage of this new maneuver. Speculation and rumor abound of other raider-activist pairings and other targets.

Questions of legality are also being raised. Pershing Square and Valeant are loudly proclaiming that they have very cleverly (and profitably) navigated their way through a series of loopholes to create a new template for hostile acquisitions, one in which the strategic bidder cannot lose and the activist greatly increases its odds of catalyzing a quick profit-yielding event, investing and striking deals on both sides of a transaction in advance of a public announcement.

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Performance Terms in CEO Compensation Contracts

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, April 25, 2014
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The following post comes to us from David De Angelis of the Finance Area at Rice University and Yaniv Grinstein of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.

CEO compensation in U.S. public firms has attracted a great deal of empirical work. Yet our understanding of the contractual terms that govern CEO compensation and especially how the compensation committee ties CEO compensation to performance is still incomplete. The main reason is that CEO compensation contracts are, in general, not observable. For the most part, firms disclose only the realized amounts that their CEOs receive at the end of any given year. The terms by which the board determines these amounts are not fully disclosed.

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CEO Succession in the S&P 500: Statistics and Case Studies

Posted by Matteo Tonello, The Conference Board, on
Friday, April 25, 2014
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Matteo Tonello is Managing Director at The Conference Board, Inc. This post relates to CEO Succession Practices: 2014 Edition, a Conference Board report authored 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].

CEO Succession Practices, which The Conference Board updates annually, documents CEO turnover events at S&P 500 companies. The 2014 edition contains a historical comparison of 2013 CEO successions with data dating back to 2000. In addition to analyzing the correlation between CEO succession and company performance, the report discusses age, tenure, and the professional qualifications of incoming and departing CEOs. It also describes succession planning practices (including the adoption rate of mandatory CEO retirement policies and the frequency of performance evaluations), based on findings from a survey of general counsel and corporate secretaries at more than 150 U.S. public companies.

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Looking at Corporate Governance from the Investor’s Perspective

Posted by Luis A. Aguilar, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on
Thursday, April 24, 2014
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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 remarks at Emory University School of Law’s Corporate Governance Lecture Series; the full text, including footnotes, 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.

Corporate governance has always been an important topic. It is even more so today, as many Americans recognize the need to develop a more robust corporate governance regime in the aftermath of the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Although the recent financial crisis—aptly named the “Great Recession”—has many fathers, there is ample evidence that poor corporate governance, including weak risk management standards at many financial institutions, contributed to the devastation wrought by the crisis. For example, it has been reported that senior executives at both AIG and Merrill Lynch tried to warn their respective management teams of excessive exposure to subprime mortgages, but were rebuffed or ignored. These and other failures of oversight continue to remind us that good corporate governance is essential to the stability of our capital markets and our economy, as well as the protection of investors.

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SEC Issues Guidance on Use of Social Media in Offerings and Proxy Fights

Posted by Trevor Norwitz, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
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Trevor Norwitz is a partner in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, where he focuses on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance and securities law matters. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton firm memorandum by Mr. Norwitz, Sabastian V. Niles, Eitan S. Hoenig, and Matthew I. Danzig.

The SEC staff has released new guidance regarding the use of social media such as Twitter in securities offerings, business combinations and proxy contests (as a senior SEC official telegraphed at the Tulane Corporate Law Institute conference). Until now, SEC legending requirements have restricted an issuer’s ability to communicate electronically using Twitter or similar technologies with built-in character limitations before having an effective registration statement for offerees, or definitive proxy statement for stockholders (as the legends generally exceed the character limits). Companies using Twitter and similar media with character limits can now satisfy these legend requirements by using an active hyperlink to the full legend and ensuring that the hyperlink itself clearly conveys that it leads to important information. Although the SEC guidance does not provide example language, hyperlinks styled as “Important Information” or “SEC Legend” would seem to satisfy this standard. Social media platforms that do not have restrictive character limitations, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, must still include the full legend in the body of the message to offerees or stockholders.

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The Informational Role of Internet-Based Short Sellers

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Lei Chen of the Department of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Despite serious concerns about the quality of auditing and financial reporting of U.S.-listed Chinese firms, the SEC and the PCAOB have been unable to provide sufficient or timely information to U.S. investors due to resource constraints, the confidentiality rules underlying the PCAOB disciplinary proceedings, and no access to relevant work papers of Chinese auditors. In the paper, The Informational Role of Internet-Based Short Sellers, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I focus on a new breed of information intermediary, i.e. Internet-based short sellers that have emerged in response to such regulatory loopholes and severe information asymmetry. Based on hand-collected Internet reports released during the 2009-2012 period by short sellers that target U.S.-listed Chinese firms, I find that these short sellers provide substantial information both directly and indirectly to investors.

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