Monthly Archives: September 2014

Update on Directors’ and Officers’ Insurance in Bankruptcy

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Douglas K. Mayer, Of Counsel in the Restructuring and Finance Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Mayer, Martin J.E. Arms, and Emil A. Kleinhaus.

Directors’ and officers’ (“D&O”) insurance coverage continues to represent a key element of corporate risk management. See memo of July 28 2009. A decision in the bankruptcy of commodities brokerage MF Global, In re MF Global Holdings Ltd., No. 11-15059 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 4, 2014), provides a recent illustration of how D&O insurance may be treated upon the bankruptcy of the insured company, depending on the specific structure and terms of the insurance at issue.

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Radical Shareholder Primacy

Posted by June Rhee, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
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The following post comes to us from David Millon, the J.B. Stombock Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University.

My article, Radical Shareholder Primacy, written for a symposium on the history of corporate social responsibility, seeks to make sense of the surprising disagreement within the corporate law academy on the foundational legal question of corporate purpose: does the law require shareholder primacy or not? I argue that disagreement on this question is due to an unappreciated ambiguity in the shareholder primacy idea. I identify two models of shareholder primacy, the “radical” and the “traditional.” Radical shareholder primacy makes strong claims about both shareholder governance rights, conceiving of management as the shareholders’ agent, and also about corporate purpose, insisting that corporate law mandates shareholder wealth maximization. Because there is no legal basis for either of these claims, those who deny that shareholder primacy is the law are correct at least as to this model. However, the traditional version of shareholder primacy accords to shareholders a special place in the corporation’s governance structure vis-à-vis the corporation’s nonshareholder stakeholders, for example, with respect to voting rights and the right to bring derivative suits. Beyond this privileged position in the horizontal dimension, there is no maximization mandate and corporate law does very little to provide shareholders with the tools necessary to exercise governance powers; there is no primacy in the vertical dimension or on the question of corporate purpose. Nevertheless, this conception of shareholder primacy—modest as it is—is enshrined in corporate law. Those who deny that shareholder primacy is the law need to acknowledge this fact, but once it is understood that traditional shareholder primacy has little in common with the radical version there is no reason to be reluctant to do so.

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Why Delaware Appraisal Awards Exceed the Merger Price

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Philip Richter, partner and co-head of the Mergers and Acquisitions Practice at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, and is based on a Fried Frank publication by Mr. Richter, Steven Epstein, David Shine, and Gail Weinstein. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here. 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.

As has been widely noted, the number of post-merger appraisal petitions in Delaware has increased significantly in recent years, due primarily to the rise of appraisal arbitrage as a weapon of shareholder activists seeking alternative methods of influence and value creation in the M&A sphere. The phenomenon of appraisal arbitrage is to a great extent a product of the frequency with which the Delaware Chancery Court has appraised dissenting shares at “fair values” that are higher (often, far higher) than the merger consideration in the transactions from which the shareholders are dissenting. Our analysis of the post-trial appraisal decisions issued in Delaware since 2010 indicates that the court’s appraisal determinations have exceeded the merger price in all but two cases—with the appraisal determinations representing premiums over the merger price ranging from 8.5% to 149% (with an average of 61%).

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The Effect of Deferred and Non-Prosecution Agreements on Corporate Governance

Posted by June Rhee, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Wulf A. Kaal and Timothy Lacine of University of St. Thomas School of Law.

The increasing use of Non- and Deferred Prosecution Agreements (N/DPAs) has enabled federal prosecutors to incrementally expand their traditional role, exemplifying a shift in prosecutorial culture from an ex-post focus on punishment to an ex-ante emphasis on compliance. N/DPAs are contractual arrangements between the government and corporate entities that allow the government to impose sanctions against the respective entity and set up institutional changes in exchange for the government’s agreement to forego further investigation and corporate criminal indictment. N/DPAs enable corporations to resolve allegations of corporate criminal conduct, strengthen corporate compliance mechanisms to prevent corporate wrongdoing in the future, and mitigate the risks that collateral consequences of a conviction can bring for companies, their shareholders, employees, and the economy.

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The Need for Improved Transparency

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Monday, September 22, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Darrell M. West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, and based on a book authored by Mr. West, titled “Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust;” a sample chapter may be downloaded for free here. Work from the Program on Corporate Governance about corporate political spending includes Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson, discussed on the Forum here. A committee of law professors co-chaired by Bebchuk and Jackson submitted a rulemaking petition to the SEC concerning corporate political spending; that petition is discussed here.

Anyone paying the slightest amount of attention recognizes that the U.S. political system is performing poorly. Washington is gripped by extreme partisanship, which prevents Congress from conducting even routine business, and cooperation between the executive and legislative branches is near historic lows. But as I argue in my new book, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust, the problem with the nation’s politics is even deeper than the daily headlines suggest. There is limited transparency surrounding money and politics, and many institutions that in the past could counterbalance the power of the wealthy and other special interests have grown weak. It is difficult for financially strapped news organizations to provide quality coverage of government, and political parties have become heavily dependent on a relatively small number of wealthy and well-connected people for campaign contributions.

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The State of State Competition for Incorporations

Posted by Marcel Kahan, NYU School of Law, on
Monday, September 22, 2014
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Marcel Kahan is the George T. Lowy Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

The competition by states for incorporations has long been the subject of extensive scholarship. Views of this competition differ radically. While some commentators regard it as “The Genius of American Corporate Law,” others believe it leads to a “Race to the Bottom” and yet others have taken the position that it barely exists. Despite this lack of consensus among corporate law scholars, scholars in other fields have treated state competition for incorporations as a paradigm case of regulatory competition.

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SEC Enforcement Actions Over Stock Transaction Reporting Obligations

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Sunday, September 21, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Ronald O. Mueller, partner in the securities regulation and corporate governance practice area of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and is based on a Gibson Dunn alert.

On September 10, 2014, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced an unprecedented enforcement sweep against 34 companies and individuals for alleged failures to timely file with the SEC various Section 16(a) filings (Forms 3, 4 and 5) and Schedules 13D and 13G (the “September 10 actions”). [1] The September 10 actions named 13 corporate officers or directors, five individuals and 10 investment firms with beneficial ownership of publicly traded companies, and six public companies; all but one settled the claims without admitting or denying the allegations. The SEC emphasized that the filing requirements may be violated even inadvertently, without any showing of scienter. Notably, among the executives targeted by the SEC were some who had provided their employers with trading information and relied on the company to make the requisite SEC filings on their behalf.

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SEC Adopts Long Awaited Rules for Asset-Backed Securities

Posted by Theodore N. Mirvis, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, on
Saturday, September 20, 2014
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Theodore N. Mirvis is a partner in the Litigation Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The following post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Mirvis, Carrie M. Reilly, and Brandon C. Price.

Earlier this week, the SEC adopted significant changes to Regulation AB, which governs the offering process and disclosure and periodic reporting requirements for public offerings of asset-backed securities, including residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS). The revisions to Regulation AB were a long time coming—they were first proposed in 2010 and have drawn several rounds of comments from industry participants. Issuers must comply with the new rules no later than one year after publication in the Federal Registrar (or two years in the case of the asset-level disclosure requirements described below). The new rules do not address “risk retention” by sponsors which is the subject of a separate rule-making process.

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Real Effects of Frequent Financial Reporting

Posted by R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Friday, September 19, 2014
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The following post comes to us from Arthur Kraft of Cass Business School, City University London, and Rahul Vashishtha and Mohan Venkatachalam, both of the Accounting Area at Duke University.

In our paper, Real Effects of Frequent Financial Reporting, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine the impact of financial reporting frequency on firms’ investment decisions. Whether increased financial reporting frequency improves or adversely influences a manager’s investments decision is ambiguous. On the one hand, increased transparency through higher reporting frequency can beneficially affect firms’ investment decisions in two ways. First, increased transparency can reduce firms’ cost of capital and improve access to external financing, allowing firms to invest in a larger set of positive NPV projects. Second, increased transparency can improve external monitoring and help mitigate over- or under-investment stemming from managerial agency problems. On the other hand, frequent reporting can distort investment decisions. In particular, frequent reporting can cause managers to make myopic investment decisions that boost short-term performance measures at the cost of long run firm value. Which of these two forces dominate is an open empirical question that we explore in this study.

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Delaware Court Finds Two Transactions Not Entirely Fair

Posted by Kobi Kastiel, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on
Thursday, September 18, 2014
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The following post comes to us from David J. Berger, partner focusing on corporate governance at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and is based on a WSGR Alert memorandum. 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.

On September 4, 2014, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued two lengthy post-trial opinions, [1] both authored by Vice Chancellor John W. Noble, finding that recapitalization or restructuring transactions did not satisfy the entire fairness standard of review. Although plaintiffs in each instance had received a fair price, the court found that the defendants had employed unfair processes and breached their fiduciary duties.

Significantly, one of the cases involved a recognizable set of facts: various plaintiff stockholders challenged a recapitalization that was approved at the same time the company conducted an “insider” round of financing as the company was running out of cash. The recapitalization and financing were approved by a five-member board of directors, three of whom were designated by venture capital funds that either participated in the financing or were said to have received a special benefit, with no participation by the company’s other stockholders. While the company received an informal and insider-led valuation of $4 million at the time of the recapitalization, the court found that the company’s equity at that time actually had a value of zero. However, as a result of the recapitalization, the company was able to acquire new lines of businesses. Four years after the recapitalization, the company was sold for $175 million. Following the sale, six years of litigation unfolded.

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