Corporate Finance

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In my Corporate Finance class this morning, as a capstone experience, I asked my students to read and be prepared to comment on an article I wrote a bit over a decade ago.  The article, Federal Interventions in Private Enterprise in the United States: Their Genesis in and Effects on Corporate Finance Instruments and Transactions, 40 Seton Hall L. Rev 1487 (2010), offers information and observations about the U.S. government’s engagements as an investor, bankruptcy transformer, and M&A gadfly/matchmaker in responding to the global financial crisis.  A discussion of the article typically leads to a nice review of several things we have covered over the course of the semester.  I have a number of topics I want to ensure we engage with, but I allow some free rein.

Today, one of our interesting bits of discussion centered around the possibility that the U.S. government became a controlling shareholder for a time due to the nature of its high percentage ownership interest in, for example, AIG.  This was not directly addressed in my article.  Nevertheless, we set into a discussion of the substance, citing to Sinclair Oil Corp. v. Levien, one of Josh Fershee’s favorite cases.  We also…

Business Law Today, the American bar Association’s business law magazine, has published a super guide to The Corporate Transparency Act, which became effective earlier this year.  The guide comes in the form of an article, “The Corporate Transparency Act – Preparing for the Federal Database of Beneficial Ownership Information,” co-authored by Robert W. Downes, Scott E. Ludwig, Thomas E. Rutledge, and Laurie A. Smiley.  The article reviews the act and clarifies a number of its key provisions.  The following background is excerpted from the introduction of the article:

The Corporate Transparency Act requires certain business entities (each defined as a “reporting company”) to file, in the absence of an exemption, information on their “beneficial owners” with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) of the U.S. Department of Treasury (“Treasury”). The information will not be publicly available, but FinCEN is authorized to disclose the information:

– to U.S. federal law enforcement agencies,

– with court approval, to certain other enforcement agencies to non-U.S. law enforcement agencies, prosecutors or judges based upon a request of a U.S. federal law enforcement agency, and

– with consent of the reporting company, to financial institutions and their regulators.

The Corporate Transparency Act…

Wow.  All I can say is . . . wow.  Last Monday, GameStop Corp. was, for me, just a dinosaur in the computer gaming space–a firm with a bricks-and-mortar retail store in our local mall that I have visited maybe once or twice.  What a difference a week makes . . . .

Now, GameStop is: frequent email messages in my in box; populist investor uprisings against establishment institutional investors; concern about students investing through day-trading accounts; news and opinion commentary on all of the foregoing (and more); compulsion to inform an under-informed (and, in some cases, bewildered) community of friends and family.  This change of circumstances, which is centered on, but not confined to, the volatile market for GameStop’s common stock, raises many, many questions–legal questions and factual questions.  Some are definitively answerable, others are not.

The legal questions run the gamut from possibilities of securities fraud (including insider trading) and market manipulation, to the governance of trading platforms, the propriety of trading limitations and halts, and the authority and control of clearinghouses.  Co-blogger Ben Edwards published a post here last Thursday on the trading halts in GameStop stock, the role of clearinghouses, and the possibility of market manipulation. …

This is my second post in a series of blog posts on the “Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance (“Study on Directors’ Duties”) prepared by Ernst & Young for the European Commission.

In 2015, the world gathered at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit for the adoption of the Post-2015 development agenda. That Summit was convened as a high-level plenary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. At this meeting, Resolution A/70/L.1, Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, was adopted by the General Assembly. In 2016, the Paris Agreement was signed. In my last post, I called both the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement trendsetters because they kicked-off a global discussion on sustainable development at so many levels, including at the financial level.

During the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, I recall that the Civil Society representatives called for a UN resolution on sustainable capital markets to tackle the absence of concrete actions regarding global financial sustainability following the 2008 Great Recession.

At the end of 2016, the European Commission (Commission) created the High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance (HLEG). In early 2018, the HLEG published its report…

I have written here in the past about laboring on Labor Day.  Most recently.  I wrote about the relationship between work and mindfulness in this space last year.  But it seems I also have picked up this theme here (in 2018) and here (at the end of my Labor Day post in 2017).  Being the routine “Monday blogger” for the BLPB does give me the opportunity to focus on our Monday holidays!

This year, however, Labor Day–like so many other days in 2020–is markedly different in one aspect: I am required to teach today.  When I logged in to the campus app on my phone this morning to do my routine daily health screening, I was greeted by this (in clicking through from the main event schedule page):

This is the first day in my 20 years of teaching, and maybe in my 35 years of post-law school work, that I have been required to work on Labor Day.  My daughter, a Starbucks night shift manager, is required to work every year on Labor Day.  But this is new to me . . . .

Of course, the ongoing pandemic is the reason for this change.  By compacting the semester…

Earlier today, I submitted a book chapter with the same title as this blog post.  The chapter, written for an international management resource on Digital Entrepreneurship and the Sharing Economy, represents part of a project on crowdfunding and poverty that I have been researching and thinking through for a bit over two years now.  My chapter abstract follows:

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and created economic hardship all over the world.  The United States is no exception.  Among other things, the economic effects of the COVID-19 crisis deepen pre-existing concerns about financing U.S. businesses formed and promoted by entrepreneurs of modest means.

In May 2016, a U.S. federal registration exemption for crowdfunded securities offerings came into existence (under the CROWDFUND Act) as a means of helping start-ups and small businesses obtain funding.  In theory, this regime was an attempt to fill gaps in U.S. securities law that handicapped entrepreneurs and their promoters from obtaining equity, debt, and other financing through the sale of financial investment instruments over the Internet.  The use of the Internet for business finance is particularly important to U.S. entrepreneurs who may not have access to funding because of their own limited financial and economic positions.…

The title of this post is the title of a panel discussion I organized for the 2019 Business Law Prof Blog symposium, held back in September of last year.  (Readers may recall that I posted on this session back at the time, under the same title.)  The panel experience was indescribably satisfying for me.  It represented one of those moments in life where one just feels so lucky . . . .

Why?  Because it fulfilled a dream, of sorts, that I have had for quite a while.  Here’s the story.

About ten years ago, I ended up in a conversation with two of my beloved Tennessee Law colleagues while we were grabbing afternoon beverages.  One of these colleagues is a tax geek; the other is a property guy.  Somehow, we got into a discussion about mergers and acquisitions.  I was asked how I would define a merger as a matter of corporate law, and part of my answer (that mergers are magic) got these two folks all riled up (in a professional, academic, nerdy way).  The conversation included some passionate exchanges.  It was an exhilerating experience.

I have remembered that exchange for all of these years, vowing to myself…

Friend of the BLPB and fellow crowdfunding researcher Andrew Schwartz recently posted this article on SSRN: Mandatory Disclosure in Primary Markets, 2019 Utah L. Rev. 1069.  I was provoked by the abstract, which reads as follows:

Mandatory disclosure—the idea that companies must be legally required to disclose certain, specified information to public investors—is the first principle of modern securities law. Despite the high costs it imposes, mandatory disclosure has been well defended by legal scholars on two theoretical grounds: ‘Agency costs’ and ‘information underproduction.’ While these two concepts are a good fit for secondary markets (where investors trade securities with one another), this Article shows that they are largely irrelevant in the context of primary markets (where companies offer securities directly to investors). The surprising result is that primary offerings—such as an IPO—may not require mandatory disclosure at all. This profound insight calls into question the fundamental premises of the Securities Act of 1933 and similar laws governing primary offerings around the world. Reform of these rules could lead to a new age of simplified, low-cost primary offerings to the public, something that is already happening in New Zealand through its equity crowdfunding market.

As someone who believes…

I recently had occasion to offer background to, and be interviewed by, a local television reporter about a publicly traded firm that owns several health care facilities in East Tennessee and has been financed significantly through loans from and corporate payments made by a member of its board of directors.  The resulting article and news clip can be found here.  Since the story was published, a Form 8-K was filed reporting that the director has resigned from the board and the firm is negotiating with him to cancel its indebtedness in exchange for preferred stock.

In reviewing published reports on the firm, Rennova Health, Inc., I learned that it had been delisted from NASDAQ back in 2018.  The reason?  The firm engaged in too many stock splits.

I also came across an article reporting that another health care firm, a middle Tennessee skilled nursing provider, Diversicare Healthcare Services, Inc., had been delisted in late 2019.  The same article noted two additional middle Tennessee health care firms also were in danger of being delisted from stock exchanges.  One was subsequently delisted. 

Health care mergers and acquisitions also have been in the news here in Tennessee.  A Tennessee/Virginia…

Churchill'sPort

Avid BLPB readers may have noticed that I failed to post on Monday of last week.  I was traveling from Portugal to Spain that day.  I did plan to make this post then, but travel scrambles (thanks to the Porto metro) and delays (thanks to Ryanair) prevented me from getting to a computer with Internet access until late in the day.  By then, I was too exhausted to post.  So, you get last Monday’s post this Monday!  No harm done; this post is not time-sensitive.

Ever heard of Graham’s port?  The Graham’s port lodge was founded by brothers William and John Graham back at the beginning of the 18th century.  Fast-forward 150 years, and the Graham family sells the then-very-successful Graham’s port business to another family.  That second family still runs the Graham’s business today.

But a Graham descendant still wanted to be in the port business.  He thought he had a “better way.”  So, 11 years after the Graham family sold Graham’s, John Graham (not the same one, obviously!) established the Churchill port lodge.  Here’s what the Churchill’s website says about its formation as a business:

Churchill’s was founded in 1981 by John Graham, making it…