Monthly Archives: August 2015

2016 ISS Policy Survey

Linda Pappas and Maggie Choi are Consultants at Pay Governance LLC. This post is based on a Pay Governance memorandum.

In August 4, 2015, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) released its annual policy survey for the 2016 proxy voting season. The survey encompasses its global proxy voting policies across all potential topic areas. The responses elicited from the survey are used to assist ISS in developing changes to its proxy voting policy guidelines, and will be open for one month (until September 4, 2015). Upon closing of the survey, there will be an open comment period prior to the finalization of the updated ISS proxy voting policies which are targeted for release in November 2015.

The key survey areas specifically related to compensation for 2016 include use of adjusted or non-GAAP metrics in incentive compensation programs and equity compensation vehicles for non-executive directors. This post focuses on these two topic areas, and touches on other noteworthy U.S. and global policy areas.

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Institutional Investors and Corporate Short-Termism

Robert C. Pozen is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. This post is based on an article forthcoming in the Financial Analysts Journal. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang (discussed on the Forum here), and The Myth that Insulating Boards Serves Long-Term Value by Lucian Bebchuk (discussed on the Forum here).

Across the world, a clamor is rising against corporate short-termism—the undue attention to quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term sustainable growth. In one survey of chief financial officers, the majority of respondents reported that they would forgo current spending on profitable long-term projects to avoid missing earnings estimates for the upcoming quarter.

Critics of short-termism have singled out a set of culprits—activist hedge funds that acquire 1% or 2% of a company’s stock and then push hard for measures designed to boost the stock price quickly but unsustainably. The typical activist program involves raising dividends, increasing stock buybacks, or spinning off corporate divisions—usually accompanied by a request for board seats.

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Delaware Court Awards Damages to Option Holders

Jason M. Halper is a partner in the Securities Litigation & Regulatory Enforcement Practice Group at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. This post is based on an Orrick publication by Mr. Halper and Peter J. Rooney. 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 July 28, 2015, the Delaware Court of Chancery issued a post-trial opinion in which it criticized in particularly strong terms the analysis performed by a financial firm that was retained to value companies that were being sold to a third party or spun off to stockholders (the “valuation firm”). See Fox v. CDX Holdings Inc., C.A. No. 8031-VCL (Del Ch. July 28, 2015)CDX is just the latest decision in which the Chancery Court has awarded damages and/or ordered injunctive relief based in part on a financial firm’s failure to discharge its role appropriately. Calling the valuation firm’s work “a new low,” Vice Chancellor Laster’s opinion is another chapter in this cautionary tale that lays bare how financial firms can be exposed not only to potential monetary liability but, as importantly, significant reputational harm from flawed sell side work on M&A transactions.

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Fed/FDIC Comments on Wave 3 Resolution Plans

Dan Ryan is Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. This post is based on a PwC publication by Mr. Ryan, Mike Alix, Adam Gilbert, and Armen Meyer.

On July 28th, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board (together, “the regulators”) announced that they have provided private feedback on the resolution plans of 119 Wave 3 banking institutions [1] and the three systemically important non-bank financial institutions. [2] Unlike the regulators’ highly critical August 2014 public commentary on the 2013 resolution plans filed by Wave 1 banking institutions, [3] this week’s comments are largely silent on the regulators’ view of the plans’ adequacy:

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Scrutiny of Private Equity Firms

Veronica Rendón Callahan is a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP and co-chair of the firm’s Securities Enforcement and Litigation practice. This post is a based on an Arnold & Porter memorandum.

On June 29, 2015, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. with misallocating more than $17 million in broken deal expenses to its flagship private equity funds in breach of its fiduciary duty as an SEC-registered investment adviser. KKR agreed to pay nearly $30 million to settle the charges. This action represents a continuing and robust focus by the SEC on fee and expense allocation practices and disclosure by private equity fund advisers, many of which are relatively newly registered with the SEC following passage of the Dodd-Frank Act. It serves as a reminder of the need for private equity firms and other advisers to private investment funds to consider bolstering their compliance and disclosure policies and procedures related to the allocation of fees and expenses.
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Preliminary 2015 Proxy Season Review

Subodh Mishra is Executive Director for Communications and Head of Governance Exchange at Institutional Shareholder Services. This post is based on an ISS white paper by Patrick McGurn, Special Counsel and Head of Strategic Research and Analysis, and Edward Kamonjoh, U.S. Head of Strategic Research and Analysis. The complete publication is available here.

Momentum is the buzzword that best describes the 2015 Proxy Season in the U.S. market. Some issues, such as proxy access, hit the ground running and emerged as ballot box juggernauts. Other topics, such as calls for independent board chairs and heightened scrutiny of human rights, stumbled and lost ground. Some new ideas, such as hybrid climate change risk initiatives aimed at impacting board deliberations on compensation and CAPEX, failed to catch fire. Despite the rising proxy access tide, E&S proposals swamped their governance and compensation cousins in the pre-season family reunion headcount. However, big submission numbers failed to translate into growing support. Just one environmental proposal managed to win majority support in the year’s first six months.

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2015 Activism Update

Eduardo Gallardo is a partner focusing on mergers and acquisitions at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. This post is based on a Gibson Dunn client alert. The full publication, including tables, is available here. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang (discussed on the Forum here), The Myth that Insulating Boards Serves Long-Term Value by Lucian Bebchuk (discussed on the Forum here), The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure by Lucian Bebchuk and Robert J. Jackson Jr. (discussed on the Forum here), and Pre-Disclosure Accumulations by Activist Investors: Evidence and Policy by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Robert J. Jackson Jr., and Wei Jiang.

This post provides an update on shareholder activism activity involving publicly traded domestic companies during the first half of 2015. At the midway point of 2015, shareholder activism shows no signs of slowing. In fact, our survey for the first half of 2015 includes nearly as many activist campaigns as did our survey for all of 2014.

Although funds continue to make news with activist campaigns involving large domestic companies, the most notable trend is the sheer number of funds involved in activist campaigns that are captured by our survey: 42 funds in just the first half of 2015 versus 35 funds for all of 2014.

In all, our 2015 Mid-Year Activism Update covers 56 public activist campaigns at 50 unique domestic companies by 42 unique investors during the period from January 1, 2015 to June 30, 2015. Ten of those companies faced advances from at least two activist investors. Market capitalizations of the targets range from just above our study’s $1 billion minimum to approximately $120 billion.

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Do Women Stay Out of Trouble?

Anup Agrawal is Professor of Finance at the University of Alabama. This post is based on an article authored by Professor Agrawal; Binay Adhikari, Visiting Assistant Professor of Finance at Miami University; and James Malm, Assistant Professor of Finance at the College of Charleston.

Does the presence of women in a firm’s top management team affect the risk of the firm being sued? A large literature in economics and psychology finds that women tend be more risk-averse, less overconfident, and more law-abiding than men. As more women reach top management positions, these gender differences have implications for firms’ policies and performance. As Neelie Kroes, then European Competition Commissioner provocatively asked in a speech at the World Economic Forum, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, would the financial crisis have happened like it did?” (see New York Times, February 1, 2009).

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Legal & General Calls for End to Quarterly Reporting

Martin Lipton is a founding partner of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, specializing in mergers and acquisitions and matters affecting corporate policy and strategy. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Lipton and Sabastian V. Niles. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Long-Term Effects of Hedge Fund Activism by Lucian Bebchuk, Alon Brav, and Wei Jiang (discussed on the Forum here) and The Myth that Insulating Boards Serves Long-Term Value by Lucian Bebchuk (discussed on the Forum here).

This summer, Legal & General Investment Management, a major European asset manager and global investor with over £700 billion in total assets under management, contacted the Boards of the London Stock Exchange’s 350 largest companies to support the discontinuation of company quarterly reporting, emphasizing that:

  • “[R]eporting which focuses on short-term performance is not necessarily conducive to building a sustainable business as it may steer management to focus more on short-term goals and away from future business drivers. We, therefore, support the recent regulatory change that removes the requirement for companies to disclose financial reports on a quarterly basis.”
  • “While each company is unique, we understand that providing the market with quarterly updates adds little value for companies that are operating in long-term business cycles. On the other hand, industries with shorter market cycles and companies in a highly competitive global market environment may choose to report more than twice a year.”
  • “Reducing the time spent on reporting that adds little to the business … can lead to more articulation of business strategies, market dynamics and innovation drivers, which are linked to key metrics that drive business performance and long-term shareholder value.

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Corporate Governance and Diversity

Aaron A. Dhir is an Associate Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Canada. The post is based on Professor Dhir’s book, Challenging Boardroom Homogeneity: Corporate Law, Governance, and Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Earlier this year, Germany joined the ranks of countries such as Norway, France, Italy, Belgium, and Iceland by enacting a quota to increase the number of women in its corporate boardrooms. Starting in 2016, both genders must make-up at least 30 percent of specified German companies’ supervisory boards.

The news from Germany provoked decidedly negative reactions in major media outlets. In the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Economist, critics questioned the soundness of pursuing positive discrimination in the corporate governance arena. The reality, however, is that we actually know very little about how corporate quotas have worked in practice. Advocates and detractors each suggest that these measures will alter the effectiveness and dynamics of firms in some way—whether for better or worse. But the speculation remains largely uncorroborated and our knowledge is incomplete at best.
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