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- Peter Atkins
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HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows
Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
The M&A Landscape: Financial Institutions Rediscovering Themselves
Editor’s Note: Edward Herlihy is a partner and co-chairman of the Executive Committee at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The following post is based on a Wachtell Lipton memorandum by Mr. Herlihy, Lawrence S. Makow, Jeannemarie O’Brien, Nicholas G. Demmo, and David E. Shapiro.
The year 2014 was marked by accelerating mergers and acquisitions activity in the financial institutions space and by several distinct trends. Institutions continued to adapt to the changed regulatory environment, as several important rule proposals and releases brought the ultimate contours of that environment into clearer focus. Profitability pressures continued for traditional businesses. And, as investors continue to seek yield in a low-rate world, shareholder activism notably proliferated. Continued improvement in the economy brought new opportunities into sight and ramped up private equity activity in the financial services sector. Cutting across all of these trends, technological changes, and associated business challenges, continued to reshape firms’ strategic playbooks.
Early indications suggest the M&A activity trend continuing into 2015. In the opening days of the new year, City National agreed to merge with Royal Bank of Canada. The largest bank holding company merger since the financial crisis, at $5.4 billion, the City National deal signals the continuing recovery of the U.S. market from post-crisis distressed deal terms, transaction motivations and negotiating positions. City National is widely considered to be among the strongest franchises in the U.S. It maintained its position of strength and financial performance throughout the financial crisis—as evidenced by the 2.6x multiple of deal price to tangible book value to be paid to City National shareholders. The merger is also a significant vote of confidence by RBC in the outlook for the U.S. banking market and in particular for the type of clientele served by City National. RBC will be reentering retail and commercial banking in the U.S. with 75 branches and $32 billion in assets, and a franchise that is highly complementary to its existing strong U.S. asset management presence.
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Posted in Banking & Financial Institutions, Financial Regulation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Banks, Financial institutions, Financial regulation, Mergers & acquisitions, Shareholder activism
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Recent Delaware Rulings Support Practice of “Appraisal Arbitrage”
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from William E. Curbow, partner in the Mergers & Acquisitions practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, and is based on a Simpson Thacher 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.
In a pair of memorandum opinions written by Vice Chancellor Glasscock and decided on January 5, 2015, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, in In Re Appraisal of Ancestry.com, Inc. and Merion Capital LP v. BMC Software, Inc., found that neither the beneficial owner nor the record owner of shares for which appraisal is sought under Section 262 of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware is required to show that the specific shares for which it seeks appraisal have not been voted in favor of the merger in question by previous stockholders. The findings follow the analysis applied in In Re Appraisal of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc., a 2007 case which preceded an amendment to Section 262(e) later that year permitting beneficial owners to petition for appraisal in their own name. The decisions support the practice known as “appraisal arbitrage”—a practice which has contributed to the more than tripling of incidents of appraisal petition filings in eligible deals over the past 10 years—for investors who buy stock in target companies following the record date for stockholder votes on mergers and highlight public policy considerations concerning the role of Delaware’s appraisal statute in merger transactions.
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Click here to read the complete postUnderstanding Director Elections
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Yonca Ertimur of the Accounting Division at the University of Colorado at Boulder; Fabrizio Ferri of the Accounting Division at Columbia University; and David Oesch of the Department of Financial Accounting at the University of Zurich.
In the paper Understanding Director Elections: Determinants and Consequences, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we provide an in-depth examination of uncontested director elections. Using a hand-collected and comprehensive sample for director elections held at S&P 500 firms over the 2003–2010 period, we examine the factors driving shareholder votes in uncontested director elections, the effect of these votes on firms’ actions and the impact of these actions on firm value. We make three contributions.
First, it is well known that recommendations by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) play a key role in determining the voting outcome. Yet, the question of what factors drive ISS recommendations and, thus, shareholder votes in uncontested director elections remains largely unanswered. To fill this gap, we use the reports ISS releases to its clients ahead of the annual meeting and identify the specific reasons underlying negative ISS recommendations. We find that 38.1% of the negative recommendations target individual directors (reflecting concerns with independence, meeting attendance and number of directorships), 28.6% target an entire committee (usually the compensation committee), and the remaining 33.3% target the entire board (mostly for lack of responsiveness to shareholder proposals receiving a majority vote in the past). A withhold recommendation by ISS is associated with about 20% more votes withheld, in line with prior research. More relevant to our study, there is substantial variation in votes withheld from directors conditional on the underlying reason. A board-level ISS withhold recommendation is associated with 25.48% more votes withheld, versus 19.73% and 16.44%, respectively, for committee- and individual-level withhold recommendations. The sensitivity of shareholder votes to ISS withhold recommendations is higher when there are multiple reasons underlying the withhold recommendation for the director (a proxy for more severe concerns) and at firms with poorer governance structures. These results suggest that shareholders do not blindly follow ISS recommendations but seem to take into account their rationale, their severity and other contextual factors (e.g. governance of the firm). However, cases of high votes withheld without a negative proxy advisor recommendation are rare, suggesting that voting shareholders only focus on the issues singled out by proxy advisors, potentially at the expense of other value-relevant factors (e.g. directors’ skill set, expertise and experience) for which proxy advisors have not (yet) developed voting guidelines (perhaps due to lack of sophistication or the inherent complexity of the issue).
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Posted in Academic Research, Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Empirical Research
Tagged Boards of Directors, ISS, Proxy advisors, Shareholder voting, Uncontested elections, Withhold votes
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2014’s Valuable Lessons For M&A Financial Advisers
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Jason M. Halper, partner in the Securities Litigation & Regulatory Enforcement Practice Group at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and is based on an article by Mr. Halper, Peter J. Rooney, and Colton M. Carothers that that first appeared in Law360. 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.
During the past year, Delaware and New York courts have issued a number of decisions that have important implications for financial advisers, as well as attorneys advising them, on mergers and acquisitions transactions. From the point of view of financial advisers and their legal counsel, the record is mixed. The two decisions by the Delaware Court of Chancery in In re Rural Metro Corp. Stockholders Litigation demonstrate the perils facing M&A financial advisers (especially financial advisers that are large, multifaceted financial institutions) in today’s litigation environment, where virtually all public deals are subject to shareholder litigation.
New York courts, on the other hand, in the case of S.A. de Obras Y Servicios v. The Bank of Nova Scotia, confirmed the protection that can be accorded to financial advisers by a well-crafted engagement letter governed by New York law and litigated in a New York forum. These and other decisions discussed below also provide useful guidance for counsel charged with protecting financial advisers providing M&A advisory services.
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Posted in Court Cases, Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Delaware cases, Delaware law, Financial advisers, Merger litigation, Mergers & acquisitions, New York, Orrick
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2014 Year-End Securities Enforcement Update
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Marc J. Fagel, partner in the Securities Enforcement and White Collar Defense Practice Groups at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, and is based on a Gibson Dunn publication; the full publication, including footnotes, is available here.
The close of 2014 saw the SEC’s Division of Enforcement take a victory lap. Following the release of the statistics for the fiscal year ended September 30, Division Director Andrew Ceresney touted a few records—the largest number of enforcement actions brought in a single year (755); the largest total value of monetary sanctions awarded to the agency (over $4 billion); the largest number of cases taken to trial in recent history (30). As Ceresney noted, numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. And it is in the details that one sees just how aggressive the Division has become, and how difficult the terrain is for individuals and entities caught in the crosshairs of an SEC investigation under the current administration.
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Posted in Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement
Tagged Broker-dealers, Financial reporting, Investment advisers, Misconduct, SEC, SEC enforcement, Securities enforcement, Securities fraud, Securities litigation, Settlements, Whistleblowers
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Addressing the Lack of Transparency in the Security-Based Swap Market
Editor’s Note: Luis A. Aguilar is a Commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This post is based on Commissioner Aguilar’s remarks at a recent open meeting of the SEC; 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.
Today [January 14, 2015], the Commission considers rules that are designed to address the lack of transparency in the security-based swaps (SBS) market that substantially contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. These rules are the result of the Congressional mandate in the Dodd-Frank Act, which directed the SEC and the CFTC to create a regulatory framework to oversee this market.
The global derivatives market is huge, at an amount estimated to exceed $692 trillion worldwide—and more than $14 trillion represents transactions in SBS regulated by the SEC. The continuing lack of transparency and meaningful pricing information in the SBS market puts many investors at distinct disadvantages in negotiating transactions and understanding their risk exposures. In addition, as trillions of dollars have continued to trade in the OTC market, there is still no mandatory mechanism for regulators to obtain complete data about the potential exposure of individual financial institutions and the SBS market, in general.
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Posted in Practitioner Publications, Regulators Materials, Securities Regulation, Speeches & Testimony
Tagged Compliance & ethics, Compliance officer, Derivatives, Financial reporting, Oversight, SEC, SEC rulemaking, Securities regulation, Swaps, Transparency
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The Threat to the Economy and Society from Activism and Short-Termism Updated
Editor’s Note: 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, Sabastian V. Niles, and Sara J. Lewis. Earlier posts by Mr. Lipton on hedge fund activism are available here, here and here. Recent work from the Program on Corporate Governance about hedge fund activism 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). For five posts by Mr. Lipton criticizing the Bebchuk-Brav-Jiang paper, and for three posts by the authors replying to Mr. Lipton’s criticism, see here.
Again in 2014, as in the two previous years, there has been an increase in the number and intensity of attacks by activist hedge funds. Indeed, 2014 could well be called the “year of the wolf pack.”
With the increase in activist hedge fund attacks, particularly those aimed at achieving an immediate increase in the market value of the target by dismembering or overleveraging, there is a growing recognition of the adverse effect of these attacks on shareholders, employees, communities and the economy. Noted below are the most significant 2014 developments holding out a promise of turning the tide against activism and its proponents, including those in academia. Already in 2015 there have been several significant developments that are worth adding, which are included in bold at the end.
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Posted in Boards of Directors, Institutional Investors, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Hedge funds, Institutional Investors, Shareholder activism, Short-termism
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Forum-Selection Bylaws Refracted Through an Agency Lens
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Deborah A. DeMott, David F. Cavers Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law. 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.
Director-adopted bylaws that affect shareholders’ litigation rights have attracted both praise and controversy. Recent bylaws specify an exclusive judicial forum for litigation of corporate-governance claims, require that shareholder claims be arbitrated, and (most controversially) impose a one-way regime of fee shifting on shareholder litigants. To one degree or another, courts have legitimated each development, while commentators differ in their assessments. My paper, Forum-Selection Bylaws Refracted Through an Agency Lens, brings into clear focus issues so far blurred in the debate surrounding these types of bylaws.
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Posted in Academic Research, Boards of Directors
Tagged Agency model, Boards of Directors, Charter & bylaws, Contracts, Delaware articles, Delaware law, DGCL, Forum selection, Shareholder power, Shareholder suits
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ISS 2015 Independent Chair Policy FAQs
Editor’s Note: Carol Bowie is Head of Americas Research at Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS). This post relates to ISS independent chair voting policy guidelines for 2015.
1. How does the new approach differ from the previous approach?
Under the previous approach, ISS generally recommended for independent chair shareholder proposals unless the company satisfied all the criteria listed in the policy. Under the new approach, any single factor that may have previously resulted in a “For” or “Against” recommendation may be mitigated by other positive or negative aspects, respectively. Thus, a holistic review of all of the factors related to company’s board leadership structure, governance practices, and performance will be conducted under the new approach.
For example, under ISS’ previous approach, if the lead director of the company did not meet each one of the duties listed under the policy, ISS would have recommended For, regardless of the company’s board independence, performance, or otherwise good governance practices.
Under the new approach, in the example listed above, the company’s performance and other governance factors could mitigate concerns about the less-than-robust lead director role. Conversely, a robust lead director role may not mitigate concerns raised by other factors.
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Posted in Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Board independence, Board leadership, Boards of Directors, Proxy advisors, Proxy season, Proxy voting, Shareholder proposals
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