Corporate Finance

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My friend and colleague, Jena Martin’s coauthored book (which she wrote with another West Virginia University professor Karen Kunz) has just been released: When the Levees Break: Re-visioning Regulation of the Securities Markets. I have just started the book, and I look forward to working my way through it. I cannot say Prof. Martin and I always see eye to eye on things (though we often do), she always has a thoughtful and interesting take. It’s been an interesting read so far, and I recommend taking a look. Following is a synopsis of the book: 

The stock markets. Whether you invest or not, the workings of the stock market almost certainly touch your life. Either through your retirement fund, your mutual fund or just because you work for a place that invests (or is invested in)—the reach of the securities markets is expanding, like an ever growing tidal wave. 

This book discusses what happens when that wave hits the shore. Specifically, this book argues that, given the mounting deluge from misplaced regulation, fast-paced technology, and dominant financial players, the current US regulatory structure is woefully inadequate to hold back the tide. 

Using vivid imagery and plain language, Karen Kunz and Jena

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In July, Delaware Chancellor Andre Bouchard found that payday lender DFC Global Corp was sold too cheaply to private equity firm Lone Star Funds in 2014.  Chancellor Bouchard held that four DFC shareholders were entitled to $10.21 a share at the time of the deal, or about 7 percent above the $9.50 per share deal price that was approved by a majority of DFC shareholders.

A Gibson Dunn filing related to the DFC case on appeal before the Delaware Supreme Court sheds light on the appraisal process in Delaware.  The claim is the Chancellor Bouchard manipulated the calculations to reach the $10.21 prices.  The full brief is available here, but this summary might provide easier reading.  Reuters reports:

Bouchard made a single clerical error that led him to peg DFC’s fair value at $10.21 per share.

DFC’s lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher spotted the mistake and asked Chancellor Bouchard to fix the erroneous input. If he did, the firm said, he’d come up with a fair value for the company that was actually lower than the price Lone Star paid. The chancellor agreed to recalculate – but in addition to fixing the mistaken input, Bouchard adjusted DFC’s projected long-term

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It used to be that Friday night was Domino’s Pizza night in our house . . . .  My, how things change if one lets 15-20 years slip by unnoticed.  No more of that in our house!

I guess Domino’s is doing OK without us, however.  Third quarter 2016 financial results for Domino’s Pizza, Inc., a Delaware corporation with common stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange, were favorable as compared to the firm’s 2015 results, accordingly to the most recent quarterly earnings release.  Somebody’s eating a lot of Domino’s pizza, even if it isn’t the Heminway family.

Apparently, Domino’s wants to share the wealth–with its customers.  Co-blogger Haskell Murray pointed this recent press item out to me and co-blogger Ann Lipton in an email message last week, knowing full well that we both were or would be interested.  He was right.  Ann may have more to say on this in a later post.  (She also noted that other firms are adopting consumer benefit plans similar to the Domino’s plan I describe here today.)

Of course, as a corporate finance/securities lawyer, I immediately had visions of Ralston Purina dancing in my head.  (Not quite like visions of sugarplums, in this holiday…

General Electric (GE)  and Baker Hughes (BHI) announced on Monday, October 31st, a proposed merger to combine their oil and gas operations.  GE and Baker Hughes will form a partnership, which will own a publicly-traded company.   GE shareholders will own 62.5% of the “new” partnership, while Baker Hughes shareholders will own 37.5% and receive a one-time cash dividend of $17.50 per share.  The new company will have 9 board of director seats:  5 from GE and 4 from Baker Hughes.  GE CEO Jeff Immelt will be the chairman of the new company and Lorenzo Simonelli,  CEO of GE Oil & Gas, will be CEO. Baker Hughes CEO Martin Craighead will be vice chairman.

Reuters is describing the business synergies between the two companies as leveraging GE’s oilfield equipment manufacturing (“supplying blowout preventers, pumps and compressors used in exploration and production”) and data process services with Baker Hughes’ expertise in ” horizontal drilling, chemicals used to frack and other services key to oil production.”

Baker Hughes had previously proposed a merger with Halliburton (HAL), which failed in May, 2016, after the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block the merger. Early analysis suggests that the proposed GE & Baker Hughes will pass regulatory scrutiny because of the limited business overlap of GE and Baker Hughes.

As I plan to tell my corporations students later today: this is real life!  A high-profile, late-semester merger of two public companies is a wonderful gift.  The proposed GE/Baker Hughes merger illustrates, in real life, concepts we have been discussing (or will be soon) like partnerships, the proxy process, special shareholder meetings, SEC filings, abstain or disclose rules, and, of course, mergers.

House Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, sent a formal request to a slew of federal agencies to share trading data collected in connection with the Volcker Rule. The Volcker Rule prohibits U.S. banks from engaging in proprietary trading (effective July 21, 2015), while permitting legitimate market-making and hedging activities.  The Volcker Rule restricts commercial banks (and affiliates) from investing investing in certain hedge funds and private equity, and imposes enhanced prudential requirements on systemically identified non-bank institutions engaged in such activities.

Representative Maloney requested  the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to analyze seven quantitative trading metrics that regulators have been collecting since 2014 including: (1) risk and position limits and usage; (2) risk factor sensitivities; (3) value-at-risk (VaR) and stress VaR; (4) comprehensive profit and loss attribution; (5) inventory turnover; (6) inventory aging; and (7) customer facing trade ratios.

Representative Maloney requested the agencies analyze the data and respond to the following questions:

  • The extent to which the data showed significant changes in banks’ trading activities leading up to the July 21, 2015 effective date for the prohibition on

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We are now more than three months into the Title III crowdfunding experiment.  I have been wanting to get back to posting on Title III crowdfunding since my “LIVE” post back in May, but so much other fun stuff has been going on!  So, to make me feel a bit better on that point, I will share some current crowdfunding data with you all in this post based on publicly available information obtained from a Westlaw search performed yesterday (Sunday, August 21, 2016).  [Note to the powers that be at the SEC:  EDGAR makes it hard to find the aggregated set of Form C filings unless you are collecting data on an ongoing basis.  I hope that changes as EDGAR continues to improve . . . .]  

At the outset, I will note that others have offered their own reports on Title III crowdfunding since I last posted (including here, here, and here).  These reports offer some nice summaries.  This post offers a less comprehensive data dump focusing in on completed offerings and withdrawn offerings.  At the end, I offer some limited observations from the information provided here about crowdfunding as a small-business capital-raising alternative, the need for EDGAR adjustments, inferences about the success of Title III crowdfunded offerings, and platform disclosure about withdrawn offerings.

First, however, the top-level Westlaw-based summary:

Total Form C filings: 85 (275 filings show on Westlaw, but only 85 are non-exhibit filings representing distinct offerings)
Total Form C/A filings (amendments, including exhibit filings): 153
Total Form C-U filings (updates): 4
Total Form C-W filings (withdrawals): 2

The remainder of this post takes a shallow dive into the updates and withdrawals.  Filings in each case are presented in reverse chronological order by filing date.  All referenced dates are in 2016.  Issuer names are copied from filings and may not be the actual legal names of the entities.

If it is true that “a good thing cannot last forever,” the recent turn of events concerning appraisal arbitrage in Delaware may be a proof point. A line of cases coming out of the Delaware Court of Chancery, namely In re Appraisal of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc., No. CIV.A. 1554-CC (Del. Ch. May 2, 2007), In re Ancestry.Com, Inc., No. CV 8173-VCG (Del. Ch. Jan. 5, 2015), and Merion Capital LP v. BMC Software, Inc., No. CV 8900-VCG (Del. Ch. Jan. 5, 2015), have made one point clear: courts impose no affirmative evidence that each specific share of stock was not voted in favor of the merger—a “share-tracing” requirement. Despite this “green light” for hedge funds engaging in appraisal arbitrage, the latest case law and legislation identify some new limitations.

What Is Appraisal Arbitrage?

Under § 262 of the Delaware General Corporation Law (DGCL), a shareholder in a corporation (usually privately-held) that disagrees with a proposed plan of merger can seek appraisal from the Court of Chancery for the fair value of their shares after approval of the merger by a majority of shareholders. The appraisal-seeking shareholder, however, must not have voted in favor of the merger. Section 262, nevertheless, has been used mainly by hedge funds in a popular practice called appraisal arbitrage, the purchasing of shares in a corporation after announcement of a merger for the sole purpose of bringing an appraisal suit against the corporation. Investors do this in hopes that the court determines a fair value of the shares that is a higher price than the merger price for shares.

In Using the Absurdity Principle & Other Strategies Against Appraisal Arbitrage by Hedge Funds, I outline how this practice is problematic for merging corporations. Not only can appraisal demands lead to 200–300% premiums for investors, assets in leveraged buyouts already tied up in financing the merger create an even heavier strain on liquidating assets for cash to fund appraisal demands. Additionally, if such restraints are too burdensome due to an unusually high demand of appraisal by arbitrageurs seeking investment returns, the merger can be completely terminated under “appraisal conditions”—a contractual countermeasure giving potential buyers a way out of the merger if a threshold percentage of shares seeking appraisal rights is exceeded. The article also identifies some creative solutions that can be effected by the judiciary or parties to and affected by a merger in absence of judicial and legislative action, and it evaluates the consequences of unobstructed appraisal arbitrage.

The Issue Is the “Fungible Bulk” of Modern Trading Practices

In the leading case, Transkaryotic, counsel for a defending corporation argued that compliance with § 262 required shareholders seeking appraisal prove that each of its specific shares was not voted in favor of the merger. The court pushed back against this share-tracing requirement and held that a plain language interpretation of § 262 requires no showing that specific shares were not voted in favor of the merger, but only requires that the current holder did not vote the shares in favor of the merger. The court noted that even if it imposed such a requirement, neither party could meet it because of the way modern trading practices occur.

I was recently invited to write a short piece on crowdfunding and investor protection for a special issue of one of the publications of the CESifo Group Munich, the CESifo DICE Report–“a quarterly, English-language journal featuring articles on institutional regulations and economic policy measures that offer country comparative analyses.”  The group of authors for this publication (present company excluded) was truly impressive, and I have enjoyed reading their submissions.  My contribution is published here on the CESifo website and here on SSRN, for those who care to look it over.  

I did not hesitate to accept the CESifo Group’s invitation to publish this paper, even though it is not primary scholarship and the deadline was tight for me given other professional obligations.  (The editors did allow me to negotiate a bit on the timing, however.)  The purpose of my post today is to explain why I decided to take this opportunity.  With the limited time that we all have to produce research papers, why would I invest in this kind of an “extra” publication–one that is not likely to get me full scholarly credit (whatever that may mean) in a critical assessment of my body of work?  Here are four reasons why I value this kind…

SEC Chair Mary Jo White yesterday presented the keynote address, for the International Corporate Governance Network Annual Conference, “Focusing the Lens of Disclosure to Set the Path Forward on Board Diversity, Non-GAAP, and Sustainability.” The full speech is available here.    

In reading the speech, I found that I was talking to myself at various spots (I do that from time to time), so I thought I’d turn those thoughts into an annotated version of the speech.  In the excerpt below, I have added my comments in brackets and italics. These are my initial thoughts to the speech, and I will continue to think these ideas through to see if my impression evolves.  Overall, as is often the case with financial and other regulation, I found myself agreeing with many of the goals, but questioning whether the proposed methods were the right way to achieve the goals.  Here’s my initial take:   

I am still at Berle VIII with Haskell Murray and Anne Tucker.  One more day of my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour to go–and I have a final presentation to do.  Then, back to Knoxville to stay until late in July.  Whew!

As you may recall or know, my Berle appearance this week follows closely on the heels of a talk on the same work (on corporate purpose and litigation risk in publicly held U.S. benefit corporations) that I made at last week’s 2016 National Business Law Scholars conference.  While I am thinking about this conference, please join me in saving the date for the next one:  the 2017 National Business Law Scholars conference.  Next year’s conference will be held June 8-9 at The University of Utah S. J. Quinney College of Law, with Jeff Schwartz hosting.  I will post more information and the call for papers, etc. once I have it.