Corporate Governance

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Happy New Year!

I first posted this on Thrive Global a few weeks ago. In the spirit of the New Year, I’m sharing it with you all. 

It’s time to work on your happiness like it’s a full-time job. 2020 has challenged everyone and 2021 may not be much better. You’ve made it this far so now it’s time to reclaim your power at work with these five tips.

  • Worklife balance is a myth. Whether you’re working from home or actually going to a work site, there’s no such thing as work life balance and there never has been. It’s impossible to devote your full attention to work and family at the same time — something will suffer. As time management guru David Allen explained, you can do anything you want, you just can’t do everything you want. Learn how to say no to anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. For me, if it’s not a hell yes, then it’s a hell no. Unless you can’t say “no,” use your non-work time to do something that brings you joy and sustains you. Find a passion project. When you focus on life balance, your work life will improve.
  • Change your thoughts

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In my previous post on the “Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance” (“Study on Directors’ Duties”) that Ernst & Young prepared for the European Commission (Commission), I focused on the transformative power of corporate governance. I said that stakeholder capitalism would have a practical value if supported by corporate governance rules based on appropriate standards such as the ones provided by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Some of my pointers for the Commission were the creation of a regulatory framework that enables the representation and protection of stakeholders, the representation of “stakewatchers,” that is, non-governmental organizations and other pressure groups through the attribution of voting and veto rights and their members’ nomination to the management board (similar to German co-determination). I also suggested expanding directors’ fiduciary duties to include the protection of stakeholders’ interests, accountability of corporate managers, consultation rights, and additional disclosure requirements.

In my last guest post in this series dedicated to the Study on Directors’ Duties, I ask the following questions. Do investors have a moral duty to internalize externalities such as climate change and income inequality, for example? Do firm ownership and investor commitment matter? Should investors’ money be “moral” money? …

In my first post on the “Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance” (“Study on Directors’ Duties”) prepared by Ernst & Young for the European Commission, I said that corporate boards are free to apply a purposive approach to profit generation. I added that:

[a]pplying such a purposive approach will depend on moral leadership, CEOs’ and corporate boards’ long-term vision, clear measurement of the companies’ interests and communication of those interests to shareholders, and rethinking executive compensation to encourage board members to take on other priorities than shareholder value maximization. Corporate governance has a significant transformative role to play in this context. 

This week, I focus on corporate governance’s enabling power. Therefore, “T” is for transformative corporate governance. Market-led developments can and do precede and inspire legal rules. Corporate governance rules are not an exception in this regard. To illustrate these rules’ transformative potential, I dwell on the ongoing debate around stakeholder capitalism.

First question. What is stakeholder capitalism? In a recent debate with Lucian Bebchuk about the topic, Alex Edmans explained that “stakeholder capitalism seeks to create shareholder welfare only through creating stakeholder welfare.” The definition suggests that the way to create value for both shareholders and stakeholders…

If you read the title, you’ll see that I’m only going to ask questions. I have no answers, insights, or predictions until the President-elect announces more cabinet picks. After President Trump won the election in 2016, I posed eleven questions and then gave some preliminary commentary based on his cabinet picks two months later. Here are my initial questions based on what I’m interested in — compliance, corporate governance, human rights, and ESG. I recognize that everyone will have their own list:

  1. How will the Administration view disclosures? Will Dodd-Frank conflict minerals disclosures stay in place, regardless of the effectiveness on reducing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Will the US add mandatory human rights due diligence and disclosures like the EU??
  2. Building on Question 1, will we see more stringent requirements for ESG disclosures? Will the US follow the EU model for financial services firms, which goes into effect in March 2021? With ESG accounting for 1 in 3 dollars of assets under management, will the Biden Administration look at ESG investing more favorably than the Trump DOL? How robust will climate and ESG disclosure get? We already know that disclosure of climate

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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…

In a recently published article just posted to SSRN, I examine spousal misappropriation as a basis for an insider trading claim.  The article, Women Should Not Need to Watch Their Husbands Like [a] Hawk: Misappropriation Insider Trading in Spousal Relationships, leverages the facts of a specific Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action (SEC v. Hawk, No. 5:14-cv-01466 (N.D. Cal.)), to undertake an analysis of applicable statutory and regulatory principles, existing decisional law, and the realities of the legal and social context.  The SSRN abstract, derived from the text of the article, follows.

This article endeavors to sort through and begin to resolve key unanswered questions regarding spousal misappropriation as a basis for U.S. insider trading liability, some of which apply to insider trading more broadly. It identifies and describes misappropriation insider trading liability under U.S. law, recounts and analyzes probative doctrine and policy relevant to spousal misappropriation cases, and (before briefly concluding) offers related observations about the impact of that doctrine and policy on a specific motivating Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) enforcement action and other spousal misappropriation cases.

The analysis undertaken in the article supports enforcement actions based on a strong threshold presumption of a relationship of trust…

The post below is the first in Lécia Vicente’s December series that I heralded in my post on Friday.  Due to a Typepad login issue, I am posting for her today.  We hope to get the issue corrected for her post for next week. 

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My series of blog posts cover the recent “Study on Directors’ Duties and Sustainable Corporate Governance” (“Study on Directors’ Duties”) prepared by Ernst & Young for the European Commission. This study promises to set the tone of the EU’s policymaking in the fields of corporate law and corporate governance. The study explains that the “evidence collected over 1992-2018 period shows there is a trend for publicly listed companies within the EU to focus on short-term benefits of shareholders rather than on the long-term interests of the company.” The main objective of the study is to identify the causes of this short-termism in corporate governance and determine European Union (EU) level solutions that permit the achievement of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Both the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement are trendsetters, for they have elevated the discussion on sustainable development and climate change mitigation to the global level. That discussion has been captured not only by governments and international environmental institutions but also by corporations. Several questions come to mind.

What is sustainability? This one is critical considering that the global level discussion is often monotone, with the blatant disregard of countries’ idiosyncrasies, the different historical contexts, regulatory frameworks, and political will to implement reforms. The UN defined sustainability as the ability of humanity “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

The other question that comes to mind is: what is development? Is GDP the right benchmark, or should we be focusing on other factors? There is disagreement among economists on the merit of using GDP as a development measure. Some economists like Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo say, “it makes no sense to get too emotionally involved with individual GDP numbers.” Those numbers do not give us the whole picture of a country’s development.

The Study on Directors’ Duties maintains as a general objective the development of more sustainable corporate governance and corporate directors’ accountability for the company’s sustainable value creation. This general objective would be specifically implemented either through soft law (non-legislative measures) or hard law (legislative measures) that redesign the role of directors (this includes the creation of a new board position, the Chief Value Officer) and directors’ fiduciary duties. This takes me to a third question.

What is the purpose of the company? In other words, what is it that directors should be prioritizing? In a recent blog post, Steve Bainbridge says

I don’t “disagree with the assertion that the law does not mandate that a corporation have as its purpose shareholder wealth maximization” but only because I don’t think it’s useful to ask the question of “what purpose does the law mandate the corporation pursue?

[…] Purpose is always associated with the intellect. In order to have a purpose or aim, it is necessary to come to a decision; and that is the function of the intellect. But just as the corporation has neither a soul to damn nor a body to kick, the corporation has no intellect.

Bainbridge prefers “to operationalize this discussion as a question of the fiduciary duties of corporate officers and directors rather than as a corporate purpose.”

If you’re sipping some hot chocolate while reading this post or buying your Hanukah or Christmas candy, chances are you’re consuming a product made with cocoa beans harvested by child slaves in Africa. Almost twenty years ago, the eight largest chocolate companies, a US Senator, a Congressman,  the Ambassador to the Ivory Coast, NGOs, and the ILO pledged through the Harkin Engel Protocol to eliminate “the worst forms of” child slavery and forced labor in supply chains. In 2010, after seeing almost no progress, government representatives fom the US, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast released a Framework of Action to support the implementation and to reduce the use of child and forced labor by 70% by 2020. But, the number of child slaves has actually increased.

2020 has come and almost gone and one of the Harkin Engel signatories, Nestle, and another food conglomerate, Cargill, had to defend themselves in front of the Supreme Court this week in a case filed in 2005 by former child slaves. The John Does were allegedly kidnapped in Mali and forced to work on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, where they worked 12-14 hours a day in 100-degree weather, spoke a different language…

In his forthcoming article, “Shareholder Wealth Maximization: A Schelling Point,” my MC-Law colleague, Professor Martin Edwards, offers a new contribution to the long-standing debate concerning shareholder wealth maximization and corporate purpose. (See, e.g., here, here, here, and here.) Professor Edwards is not simply offering a rehearsal of the principled justifications for shareholder wealth maximization as the preeminent corporate purpose. Instead, he proposes a descriptive explanation for why it happened to become the received norm. Though Professor Edwards notes that reformers have offered compelling arguments for why shareholder wealth maximization may be suboptimal, he suggests that, as a Schelling point, it continues to function as a value-creating equilibrium term in the corporate bargain. The article will appear in Volume 74 of the St. John’s Law Review (forthcoming, 2021). Here’s the abstract:

Legal scholars have long debated the nature, meaning, efficacy, and even the very existence of the shareholder wealth maximization norm.  Those who model the corporation in terms of its economic efficiency tend to defend it, while those skeptical of it have made a formidable case that corporate governance might be better if managers and directors focused more on worker wealth, environmental sustainability, and various other matters…

Voting-1

Since almost all of us are thinking about Election Day 2020 (tomorrow!), I am taking a moment here to reflect on conversations I recently have had with my students about parallels in political and corporate governance.  Although current conversations center around the fiduciary duties of those charged with governance (a topic that I will leave for another day), just a few weeks ago, we were focused on voting (both shareholder and director voting).  The above photo shows me–sporting wet hair and rain-spotted, fogged-up glasses–waiting in line to vote early last week.  I admit that while I routinely vote in political elections, I have only been to a shareholder meeting once, and then as an advisor to the corporation, not to actually vote any shares held.  Having said that, in my fifteen years of law practice, I did draft proxy materials, structure shareholder meetings, and address concerns associated with shareholder voting.

My students are always curious about shareholder voting and most intrigued by proxy voting.  Corporate governance activities are, of course, not very transparent in daily life for most folks.  A course covering corporate law introduces both new terms to a student’s lexicon and new concepts to a student’s base of…