-
Supported By:
Subscribe or Follow
HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows
Program on Corporate Governance Advisory Board
- Peter Atkins
- David Bell
- Kerry E. Berchem
- Richard Brand
- Daniel Burch
- Paul Choi
- Jesse Cohn
- Arthur B. Crozier
- Renata J. Ferrari
- Andrew Freedman
- Ray Garcia
- Joseph Hall
- Jason M. Halper William P. Mills
- David Millstone
- Theodore Mirvis
- Philip Richter
- Elina Tetelbaum
- Sebastian Tiller
- Marc Trevino
- Steven J. Williams
Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
Revisiting the “Accredited Investor” Definition to Better Protect Investors
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 meeting of the SEC Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies; 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.
Thank you and good morning. I want to start by welcoming the members of the Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies to today’s meeting. I appreciate your efforts and look forward to today’s discussions. I would also like to thank the staff of the Division of Corporation Finance’s Office of Small Business Policy for organizing this meeting.
Since its formation in 2011, this Committee has provided the Commission with advice related to privately-held small businesses and the smaller publicly traded companies. It is well-known that these businesses have an outsized impact on the growth of our country’s economy and on job creation for all Americans.
As you know, today’s meeting will focus on the definition of “accredited investor.” This definition is critical to the Commission’s Regulation D exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act of 1933. Regulation D may be the Commission’s most widely used exempted offering. It is regularly used by small businesses to raise funds in the capital markets.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Practitioner Publications, Regulators Materials, Securities Regulation, Speeches & Testimony
Tagged Accredited investors, Investor protection, Registration exemptions, Rule 506, SEC, SEC rulemaking, Securities regulation
Comments Off on Revisiting the “Accredited Investor” Definition to Better Protect Investors
The Importance of a Battle-Tested Cyber Incident Response Plan
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Paul A. Ferrillo, counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP specializing in complex securities and business litigation, and is based on a Weil Alert authored by Mr. Ferrillo.
“The scope of [the Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE)] attack differs from any we have responded to in the past, as its purpose was to both destroy property and release confidential information to the public…. The bottom line is that this was an unparalleled and well planned crime, carried out by an organized group, for which neither SPE nor other companies could have been fully prepared.”
— Remarks by Kevin Mandia, “Sony Investigator Says Cyber Attack ‘Unparalleled’ Crime,” Reuters, December 7, 2014. [1]
“The days of the IT guy sitting alone in a dark corner are long gone. Cybersecurity has become an obvious priority for C-Suites and boardrooms, as reputations, intellectual property and ultimately lots of money are on the line.”
— Priya Ananda, “One Year After Target’s Breach: What Have We Learned?” November 1, 2014. [2]
“Resiliency is the ability to sustain damage but ultimately succeed. Resiliency is all about accepting that I will sustain a certain amount of damage.”
— NSA Director and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command Admiral Mike Rogers, September 16, 2014. [3]
We have definitively learned from the past few months’ worth of catastrophic cyber security breaches that throwing tens of millions of dollars at “preventive” measures is simply not enough. The bad guys are too far ahead of the malware curve for that. [4] We have also learned that there are no such things as quick fixes in the cyber security world. Instead, the best approach is a holistic approach: basic blocking and tackling such as password protection, encryption, employee training, and strong, multi-faceted intrusion detection systems [5] really trump reliance on a “50 foot high firewall” alone. But there are also two more things that are critical to a holistic cyber security approach: a strong, well-practiced Incident Response Plan (IRP), and, as Admiral Rogers noted above, the concept of cyber-resiliency, i.e., the ability to take your lumps, but continue your business operations unabated.
In this post, we tackle two questions: (1) What are the essential elements of a Cyber IRP? and (2) Why are IRPs so important to your organization?
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Boards of Directors, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Boards of Directors, Cybersecurity, Insurance, Risk, Risk management, Risk oversight
Comments Off on The Importance of a Battle-Tested Cyber Incident Response Plan
Shareholder Proposals on Social and Environmental Issues
Editor’s Note: Matteo Tonello is managing director of corporate leadership at The Conference Board. This post relates to an issue of The Conference Board’s Director Notes series authored by Melissa Aguilar and Thomas Singer. The complete publication, including footnotes, is available here.
Political spending and climate change, key topics during the 2014 proxy season, are expected to feature heavily again in 2015 shareholder proposals. This post reviews the content of the social and environmental proposals voted on most frequently by shareholders of Russell 3000 companies during the 2014 season, including the topics that received the highest average shareholder support. The complete publication provides examples of proposal text and sponsor supporting statements, as well as board responses and related corporate disclosure.
Nearly 40 percent of all shareholder proposals submitted at Russell 3000 companies that held meetings during the first half of 2014 were related to social and environmental policy issues, up from 29.2 percent in 2010, as documented in Proxy Voting Analytics (2010-2014). Social and environmental policy proposals now represent the second-largest category of the subjects in terms of both the number submitted and the number voted, narrowly behind corporate governance.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Boards of Directors, Corporate Elections & Voting, Corporate Social Responsibility, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Boards of Directors, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental disclosure, Political spending, Shareholder proposals, Shareholder voting, Sustainability, Transparency
Comments Off on Shareholder Proposals on Social and Environmental Issues
Capital Allocation and Delegation of Decision-Making Authority within Firms
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from John Graham, Campbell Harvey, and Manju Puri, all of the Finance Area at Duke University.
In our paper, Capital Allocation and Delegation of Decision-Making Authority within Firms, forthcoming in the Journal of Financial Economics, we use a unique data set that contains information on more than 1,000 Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) around the world to investigate the degree to which executives delegate financial decisions and the circumstances that drive variation in delegation. Our results can be grouped into four themes.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Academic Research, Empirical Research, International Corporate Governance & Regulation
Tagged Capital allocation, Decision-making, Information environment, International governance, Management
Comments Off on Capital Allocation and Delegation of Decision-Making Authority within Firms
Takeaways from the Past Year of SEC Private Equity Enforcement
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from John J. Sikora, partner in the Litigation Department at Latham & Watkins LLP, and is based on a Latham & Watkins publication authored by Mr. Sikora and Nabil Sabki.
After a year of “first ever” actions targeting private equity, fund managers should be vigilant, even about seemingly small issues.
In reviewing the results of SEC Enforcement’s fiscal year that ended on September 30, the agency congratulated itself on its comprehensive approach to enforcement and its “first-ever” cases. Private equity fund managers should consider a number of important takeaways.
The SEC Continues to Pursue a Broken Windows/Zero Tolerance Approach
Although the Enforcement Division announced a record number of enforcement actions, and the largest aggregate financial recovery, 2014, unlike in years past, did not include a headline-grabbing case such as Enron, Worldcom or Madoff. More recently, the agency has chosen to emphasize its pursuit of smaller cases as a way of improving compliance in the industry. SEC Chair Mary Jo White and Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney have each touted the agency’s “broken windows” approach to enforcement. A “broken windows” strategy means that the SEC will pursue even the smallest violations on the theory that publicly pursuing smaller matters will reduce the prevalence of larger violations. Ceresney has described “broken windows” as a zero tolerance policy. This past year illustrated the agency’s commitment to applying enforcement sanctions to what some might consider “foot fault” incidents. For example, in September 2014, the SEC announced a package of three dozen cases involving a failure to promptly file Section 13D and Section 13G reports, as well as Forms 3 and 4. Many of the filers charged were just days or weeks late in disclosing their positions. In announcing the cases, Ceresney emphasized that inadvertence was not a defense to late filings.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement
Tagged Compliance & ethics, Private equity, Private funds, SEC, SEC enforcement, Securities enforcement
Comments Off on Takeaways from the Past Year of SEC Private Equity Enforcement
When Are Powerful CEOs Beneficial?
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Minwen Li and Yao Lu, both of the Department of Finance at Tsinghua University, and Gordon Phillips, Professor of Finance at the University of Southern California.
In our paper, CEOs and the Product Market: When Are Powerful CEOs Beneficial?, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we explore what the central factors are that influence when and how powerful CEOs may add value and how the benefits and costs of CEO power vary with industry conditions. In an ideal world, shareholders would grant an optimal level of power, weighing various costs and benefits specific to the firm’s characteristics and the business conditions in which it operates. We hypothesize that the optimal amount of power changes based on product market conditions.
Most recent research has shown that CEO power is negatively associated with firm value and is associated with negative outcomes for the firm. Articles have suggested that powerful CEOs may be bad news for shareholders (e.g., Bebchuk, Cremers, and Peyer 2011; Landier, Sauvagnat, Sraer, and Thesmar 2013). Morse, Nanda, and Seru (2011) provide evidence that powerful CEOs may have more favorable incentive contracts. Khanna, Kim, and Lu (forthcoming) show that CEO power arising from personal decisions can increase the likelihood of fraud within corporations.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Academic Research
Tagged Executive performance, Executive value, Firm performance, Management, Market conditions
Comments Off on When Are Powerful CEOs Beneficial?
Second Circuit Overturns Insider Trading Convictions
Editor’s Note: John F. Savarese is a partner in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. This post is based on a Wachtell Lipton firm memorandum by Mr. Savarese, Wayne M. Carlin, and David B. Anders.
Earlier today [Wednesday, December 10, 2014], the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important decision overturning the insider trading convictions of two portfolio managers while clarifying what the government must prove to establish so-called “tippee liability.” United States v. Newman, et al., Nos. 13-1837-cr, 13-1917-cr (2d Cir. Dec. 10, 2014). The Court’s decision leaves undisturbed the well-established principles that a corporate insider is criminally liable when the government proves he breached fiduciary duties owed to the company’s shareholders by trading while in possession of material, non-public information, and that such a corporate insider can also be held liable if he discloses confidential corporate information to an outsider in exchange for a “personal benefit.”
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Court Cases, Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement
Tagged Corporate crime, Insider trading, Securities litigation, U.S. federal courts
Comments Off on Second Circuit Overturns Insider Trading Convictions
SEC Commissioner, Law Professor Wrongfully Accuse SRP of Securities Fraud
Editor’s Note: Jonathan R. Macey is the Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance & Securities Law at Yale University. This post analyzes the arguments in a paper by SEC Commissioner Daniel M. Gallagher and Stanford law School Professor Joseph A. Grundfest, described in a post by Professor Joseph Grundfest (available on the Forum here) and a post by Wachtell Lipton (available on the Forum here).
Here is something that one does not see every day. In their recent paper “Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law? The Campaign Against Classified Boards of Directors” posted on December 10, 2014, a sitting Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a former SEC Commissioner accuse the Shareholder Rights Project at Harvard Law School (SRP) of violating the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws. The alleged fraud occurred when institutional investors represented by the SRP proposed shareholder resolutions encouraging shareholders in U.S. public companies to vote to de-stagger their companies’ boards.
In this submission I present my analysis of this paper, concluding that the SRP proposals were not fraudulent or misleading and that the aggressive application of the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws advanced by the authors of the “Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law?” would be inconsistent with the law and, by the authors’ own admission, inconsistent with the current policy and practice of the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Click here to read the complete post…
Click here to read the complete postCurrent and Former SEC Commissioners Question Legality of Harvard Declassification Proposals
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that a current SEC Commissioner and a former SEC Commissioner (now a law professor) have published a lengthy paper challenging the scholarly bona fides—and legality—of the recent efforts by the Harvard Law School Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) to cause major American corporations to declassify their boards of directors. During the […]
Click here to read the complete postDid Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law?
SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher and I just posted on SSRN a new paper, titled Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law? The Campaign Against Classified Boards of Directors. The abstract of the paper summarizes it as follows: The Harvard Shareholder Rights Project (“Harvard SRP”) has, on more than 120 occasions, invoked SEC Rule 14a-8 to propose […]
Click here to read the complete post
Posted in Academic Research, Corporate Elections & Voting
Tagged Corporate governance, Daniel Gallagher, Joseph Grundfest, Shareholder proposals, Shareholder Rights Project, Staggered boards
Comments Off on Did Harvard Violate Federal Securities Law?