Yearly Archives: 2014

Basel Leverage Ratio: No Cover for US Banks

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, January 30, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Dan Ryan, Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. This post is based on a PwC publication, titled “Basel leverage ratio: No cover for US banks;” the full document, including appendices, is available here.

On January 12, 2014 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel Committee) issued the near final version of its leverage ratio and disclosure guidance (B3LR). The B3LR will be subject to further calibration until 2017 with final implementation expected by January 1, 2018.

The B3LR makes a number of significant changes to the Basel Committee’s June 2013 consultative paper (Consultative Paper) by easing the approach to measuring the exposures of off-balance sheet items. These changes address the industry’s concern that the Consultative Paper’s definition of exposure was too expansive (i.e., the leverage ratio’s denominator was too large).

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ISS QuickScore 2.0

Posted by David A. Katz, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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David A. Katz is a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz specializing in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and complex securities transactions. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Katz, Sabastian V. Niles, and Francis J. Stapleton; the complete publication, including annex, is available here.

Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) has announced the governance factors and other technical specifications underlying its new Governance QuickScore 2.0 product, which ISS will apply to publicly traded companies for the 2014 proxy season. Companies have until 8pm ET on Friday, February 7th to verify the underlying raw data and can submit updates and corrections through ISS’s data review and verification site. ISS will release company ratings on Tuesday, February 18th, and the scores will be included in proxy research reports issued to institutional shareholders. While previous QuickScore ratings remained static between annual meeting periods, ISS has now committed to update ratings on an on-going basis based on a company’s public disclosures throughout the calendar year.

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Non-Compete Provisions in CEO Contracts

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Michael S. Katzke, a founding partner of Katzke & Morgenbesser LLP, and is based on a Katzke & Morgenbesser publication by Mr. Katzke and Henry I. Morgenbesser.

In negotiating the terms of a CEO employment arrangement, arguably the most important term for the board of directors of the employer is the non-competition (or non-compete) provision. A recent study by three business and law school professors (Bishara, N., Martin, K, and Thomas, R., When Do CEOs Have Covenants Not to Compete in Their Employment Contracts? (October 18, 2012) Ross School of Business) has found that, in spite of concerns by commentators that CEOs often have bargaining leverage over employers, there has been a significant upward trend over time in the use of non-compete provisions in new and restated CEO contracts. The study found usage of non-competes peaked in 2008 (89%) and in 2010 was at approximately 79%, up from 60-65% in the early 1990s.

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Indexing Executive Compensation Contracts

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Ingolf Dittmann, Professor of Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam; Ernst Maug, Professor of Finance at the University of Mannheim; and Oliver Spalt of the Department of Finance at Tilburg University.

Standard principal-agent theory prescribes that managers should not be compensated on exogenous risks, such as general market movements. Rather, firms should index pay and use contracts that filter exogenous risks (e.g., Holmstrom 1979, 1982; Diamond and Verrecchia 1982). This prescription is intuitive and agrees with common sense: CEOs should receive exceptional pay only for exceptional performance, and “rational” compensation practice should not permit CEOs to obtain windfall profits in rising stock markets. However, observed compensation contracts are typically not indexed. Specifically, stock options almost never tie the strike price of the option to an index that reflects market performance or the performance of peers. Commentators often cite this glaring difference between theory and practice as evidence for the inefficiency of executive compensation practice and, more generally, as evidence for major deficiencies of corporate governance in U.S. firms (e.g., Rappaport and Nodine 1999; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2001; Bebchuk and Fried 2004). This paper therefore contributes to the discussion about which compensation practices reveal deficiencies in the pay-setting process.

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White Collar and Regulatory Enforcement Trends in 2014

Posted by John F. Savarese & Wayne M. Carlin, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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John F. Savarese and Wayne M. Carlin are partners in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton firm memorandum by Mr. Savarese, Mr. Carlin, Ralph M. Levene, David Gruenstein, and David M. Murphy.

Last year, in our annual survey (discussed on the Forum here) of the white collar and regulatory enforcement landscape, we noted that the trend toward ever more aggressive prosecutions reflected a “gloomy picture” for large companies facing such investigations. Our assessment remains the same, as the pattern of imposing massive fines and extracting huge financial settlements from companies continued unabated in 2013. For example, on November 17, 2013, DOJ announced that it had reached a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan to resolve claims arising out of the marketing and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities—the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay more than $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil investigations into off-label drug marketing and the payment of kickbacks to doctors and pharmacists. Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $1.9 billion to settle claims by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that it made misleading disclosures about mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. SAC Capital entered a guilty plea to insider trading charges and was subjected to a $1.8 billion financial penalty—the largest insider trading penalty in history. And in the fourth largest FCPA case ever, French oil company Total S.A. agreed to pay $398 million in penalties and disgorgement for bribing an Iranian official. Not to be outdone, the SEC announced that it had recovered a record $3.4 billion in monetary sanctions in the 2013 fiscal year.

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CFTC Issues Cross-Border Substituted Compliance Determinations

Posted by Annette L. Nazareth, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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Annette Nazareth is a partner in the Financial Institutions Group at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, and a former commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The following post is based on a Davis Polk client memorandum. The complete publication, including appendices, is available here.

Just one day in advance of the December 21, 2013 expiration of the CFTC’s exemptive order delaying the applicability of some CFTC swap regulations for non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers, the CFTC approved a series of comparability determinations. These comparability determinations will allow CFTC-registered non-U.S. swap dealers and foreign branches of U.S. swap dealers to comply with local requirements rather than the corresponding CFTC rules in cases where substituted compliance is available under the CFTC’s cross-border guidance. [1] The CFTC made comparability determinations for some swap dealer entity-level requirements for Australia, Canada, the European Union (the “EU”), Hong Kong, Japan and Switzerland and for a limited number of transaction-level requirements for the EU and Japan.

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Canadian Governance Insights from 2013

Posted by Noam Noked, co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Berl Nadler, partner at Davies, Ward, Phillips & Vineberg LLP, and is based on the executive summary of a Davies publication, titled “Governance Insights 2013,” available here.

This third annual edition of Governance Insights presents Davies’ analysis of the corporate governance practices of Canadian public companies over the course of 2013 and the trends and issues that influenced and shaped them.

We expect 2014 to be an active year for governance themes with greater calls for diversity on boards, a growing shareholder voice on “say on pay” resolutions, and further regulatory initiatives around proxy voting and the regulation of proxy advisory firms. We also anticipate continued discussion on shareholder activism and scrutiny of the tools and strategies used by issuers and shareholders.

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Firm Boundaries Matter

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Amit Seru, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago.

Do firm boundaries affect the allocation of resources? This question had spawned significant research in economics since it was raised in Coase (1937). A large body of work has focused on comparing the resource allocation in conglomerates relative to stand-alone firms to shed light on this issue. Theoretically, there are competing views on this aspect. On the one hand, Alchian (1969), Wiliamson (1985), and Stein (1997), among others, have put forth the view that conglomerates, by virtue of exerting centralized control over the capital allocation process, may do a better job in directing investments than the external capital markets. On the other hand, the “dark side” view of internal capital markets argues that problems of corporate socialism are more prevalent in conglomerates making them less efficient in resource allocation (Rajan, Servaes, and Zingales, 2000; Scharfstein and Stein, 2000).

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Considerations for Directors in the 2014 Proxy Season and Beyond

Posted by Amy L. Goodman, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and John F. Olson, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Georgetown Law Center, on
Monday, January 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 and John Olson is a founding partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington, D.C. office and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Law Center. The following post is based on a Gibson Dunn alert by Ms. Goodman, Mr. Olson, Gillian McPhee, and Michael J. Scanlon.

As we begin 2014, calendar-year companies are immersed in preparing for what promises to be another busy proxy season. We continue to see shareholder proposals on many of the same subjects addressed during last proxy season, as discussed in our post recapping shareholder proposal developments in 2013. To help public companies and their boards of directors prepare for the coming year’s annual meeting and plan ahead for other corporate governance developments in 2014, we discuss below several key topics to consider.

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The Corporate Governance Movement, Banks and the Financial Crisis

Posted by Brian R. Cheffins, University of Cambridge, on
Monday, January 27, 2014
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Brian Cheffins is a Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Cambridge.

The primary function of corporate governance in the United States has been to address the managerial agency cost problem that afflicts publicly traded companies with dispersed share ownership. Berle and Means threw the spotlight on this type of agency cost problem—using different nomenclature—in their famous 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1970s that the now ubiquitous corporate governance movement began. Why did the corporate governance movement gain momentum in the U.S. when it did? And given its belated arrival, why did it flourish during ensuing decades?

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