Monthly Archives: October 2014

Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior

The following post comes to us from Scott Dyreng of the Accounting Area at Duke University, Jeffrey Hoopes of the Department of Accounting & Management Information Systems at Ohio State University, and Jaron Wilde of the Department of Accounting at the University of Iowa.

In our paper, Public Pressure and Corporate Tax Behavior, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether public scrutiny related to firms’ tax avoidance activities has a significant effect on their tax avoidance behavior. In contrast to U.S. regulations that only require disclosure of significant subsidiaries, the U.K.’s Companies Act of 2006 (“Companies Act”) requires firms to disclose the name and location of all subsidiaries, regardless of size or materiality. Although the U.K. law went into effect in 2006, in 2010, ActionAid International, a global non-profit dedicated to ending poverty worldwide, discovered that approximately half of the firms in the FTSE 100 were not disclosing the name and location of all subsidiaries. ActionAid’s finding was prima facie evidence that the Companies House was not enforcing the subsidiaries disclosure requirement. More importantly, the fact that some firms chose not to comply with the law suggests that the cost of disclosing detailed information on subsidiaries was greater than the benefit of a more complete information environment for the non-compliant firms.

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The Recent Evolution of Shareholder Activism

Matteo Tonello is vice president at The Conference Board. This post relates to a report released jointly by The Conference Board and FactSet, authored by Dr. Tonello and Melissa Aguilar of The Conference Board. The Executive Summary is available here (the document is free but registration is required). For details regarding how to obtain a copy of the full report, contact [email protected].

Proxy Voting Analytics (2010-2014), a report recently released by The Conference Board in collaboration with FactSet, reviews the last five years of shareholder activism and proxy voting at Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies.

Data analyzed in the report includes:
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Financial Market Infrastructures

The following post comes to us from Guido A. Ferrarini, Professor of Business Law at University of Genoa, Department of Law, and Paolo Saguato at Law Department, London School of Economics.

In the paper Financial Market Infrastructures, recently made publicly available on SSRN and forthcoming as a chapter of The Oxford Handbook on Financial Regulation, edited by Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne (Oxford University Press), we study the impact of the post-crisis reforms on financial market infrastructures in the securities and derivatives markets.

The 2007-2009 financial crisis led to large-scale reforms to the regulation of securities and derivatives markets. Regulators around the world acknowledged the need for structural reforms to the financial system and to market infrastructures in particular. Due to the global dimension of the crisis and the extent to which financial markets had been revealed to be closely interconnected, national regulators moved the related policy debate to the supranational level. This approach led to the international regulatory guidelines and principles adopted by the G20 and then developed by the Financial Stability Board (FSB). The new global regulatory framework which has followed has institutionalized financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as key supports for financial stability and as cornerstones of the crisis-era regulatory reform agenda for financial markets.

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US Basel III Supplementary Leverage Ratio

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 diagrams, tables, and flowcharts, is available here.

The U.S. banking agencies have finalized revisions to the denominator of the supplementary leverage ratio (SLR), which include a number of key changes and clarifications to their April 2014 proposal. The SLR represents the U.S. implementation of the Basel III leverage ratio.

Under the U.S. banking agencies’ SLR framework, advanced approaches firms must maintain a minimum SLR of 3%, while the 8 U.S. bank holding companies that have been identified as global systemically important banks (U.S. G-SIBs) and their U.S. insured depository institution subsidiaries are subject to enhanced SLR standards (eSLR).

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Questions and Answers on the Liquidity Coverage Ratio

The following post comes to us from Byungkwon Lim, partner in the Corporate Department at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and leader of the firm’s Hedge Funds and Derivatives & Structured Finance Groups. This post is based on the introduction to a Debevoise & Plimpton Client Update; the full publication is available here.

On September 3, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (the “Federal Reserve”), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the “FDIC”) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (the “OCC”) (collectively, the “Agencies”), released a final rule that applies a Liquidity Coverage Ratio (the “LCR”) to certain U.S. banking organizations (the “Final Rule”). The rule finalizes a proposal published by the Agencies on October 24, 2013 (the “Proposed Rule”), and includes a number of substantive and technical changes.

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Ohio Federal Court Enforces Exclusive Forum Bylaw

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, David A. Katz, William Savitt, 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.

In a recent decision, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio invoked federal procedural law to enforce a board-adopted forum selection bylaw. North v. McNamara, No. 1:13-cv-833 (S.D. Ohio Sept. 19, 2014). In so ruling, the court recognized that such bylaws can promote “cost and efficiency benefits that inure to the corporation and its shareholders by streamlining litigation into a single forum.”

The litigation involves Chemed, a Delaware corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. In August 2013, the corporation’s board adopted a bylaw selecting any state or federal court in Delaware as the exclusive forum for intracorporate litigation. Several months later, a stockholder filed a derivative suit in federal court in Delaware on behalf of the corporation challenging certain conduct dating back to 2010. Shortly thereafter, a different stockholder filed substantially similar litigation, also on behalf of the corporation, against the same defendants concerning the same conduct in Ohio federal court. Invoking the bylaw, defendants moved to transfer the case to the Delaware federal district court under the federal venue statute, essentially seeking to consolidate it with the earlier-filed Delaware federal action.

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What Has Happened To Stock Options?

Joseph Bachelder is special counsel in the Tax, Employee Benefits & Private Clients practice group at McCarter & English, LLP. The following post is based on an article by Mr. Bachelder, with assistance from Andy Tsang, which first appeared in the New York Law Journal.

Stock options have been a part of executive pay at major U.S. corporations for approximately 100 years. They have had an important role for approximately 70 years, starting in the 1950s. They have gone through periods of extraordinary popularity (e.g., the 1990s) and have been less popular during periods when the stock markets were in the doldrums. They survived the change in accounting rules (2006) that now require them to be a charge against earnings. This post examines this history and takes a look at where options are today. [1]

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Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity: Corporate Law, Governance, and Diversity

The following post comes to us from Aaron A. Dhir, an Associate Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada and a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

The lack of gender parity in the governance of business corporations has ignited a heated global debate, leading policymakers to wrestle with difficult questions that lie at the intersection of market activity and social identity politics. In my new book, Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity: Corporate Law, Governance, and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2015), I draw on semi-structured interviews with corporate board directors in Norway and documentary content analysis of corporate securities filings in the United States to investigate empirically two distinct regulatory models designed to address diversity in the boardroom—quotas and disclosure.

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Treasury Department Seeks to Curb Inversion Transactions

The following post comes to us from Jodi J. Schwartz, partner in the Tax Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Ms. Schwartz and Michael Sabbah.

Yesterday [September 22, 2014], the Treasury Department and the IRS announced their intention to issue regulations (the “Regulations”) to limit the economic benefits of so-called “inversion” transactions in the absence of Congressional action. The Regulations, once issued, will generally apply to transactions completed on or after September 22, 2014. (Notice 2014-52, Rules Regarding Inversions and Related Transactions.)

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