Securities Regulation

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Bernard Sharfman has written another interesting article on shareholder empowerment. I wish I had read A Private Ordering Defense of a Company’s Right to Use Dual Class Share Structures in IPOs before I discussed the Snap IPO last semester in business associations.

The abstract is below:

The shareholder empowerment movement (movement) has renewed its effort to eliminate, restrict or at the very least discourage the use of dual class share structures in initial public offerings (IPOs). This renewed effort was triggered by the recent Snap Inc. IPO that utilized non-voting stock. Such advocacy, if successful, would not be trivial, as many of our most valuable and dynamic companies, including Alphabet (Google) and Facebook, have gone public by offering shares with unequal voting rights.

This Article utilizes Zohar Goshen and Richard Squire’s “principal-cost theory” to argue that the use of the dual class share structure in IPOs is a value enhancing result of the bargaining that takes place in the private ordering of corporate governance arrangements, making the movement’s renewed advocacy unwarranted.

As he has concluded:

It is important to understand that while excellent arguments can be made that the private ordering of dual class share structures must incorporate certain…

More than two years ago, I posted Shareholder Activists Can Add Value and Still Be Wrong, where I explained my view on shareholder proposals: 

I have no problem with shareholders seeking to impose their will on the board of the companies in which they hold stock.  I don’t see activist shareholder as an inherently bad thing.  I do, however, think  it’s bad when boards succumb to the whims of activist shareholders just to make the problem go away.  Boards are well served to review serious requests of all shareholders, but the board should be deciding how best to direct the company. It’s why we call them directors.    

Today, the Detroit Free Press reported that shareholders of automaker GM soundly defeated a proposal from billionaire investor David Einhorn that would have installed an alternate slate of board nominees and created two classes of stock.  (All the proposals are available here.) Shareholders who voted were against the proposals by more than 91%.  GM’s board, in materials signed by Mary Barra, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer and Theodore Solso, Independent Lead Director, launched an aggressive campaign to maintain the existing board (PDF here) and the split shares proposal (PDF here…

Loyalty has been in the news lately.  The POTUS, according to some reports, asked former Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) Director James Comey to pledge his loyalty.  Assuming the basic veracity of those reports, was the POTUS referring to loyalty to the country or to him personally?  Perhaps both and perhaps, as Peter Beinart avers in The Atlantic, the POTUS and others fail to recognize a distinction between the two.  Yet, identifying the object of a duty can be important.

I have observed that the duty of government officials is not well understood in the public realm. Donna Nagy’s fine work on this issue in connection with the proposal of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (“STOCK”) Act, later adopted by Congress, outlines a number of ways in which Congressmen and Senators, among others, may owe fiduciary duties to others.  If you have not yet been introduced to this scholarship, I highly recommend it.  If we believe that government officials are entrusted with information, among other things, in their capacity as public servants, they owe duties to the government and its citizens to use that information in authorized ways for the benefit of that government and those citizens.  In fact, Professor Nagy’s congressional testimony as part of the hearings on the STOCK Act includes the following in this regard:

Given the Constitution’s repeated reference to public offices being “of trust,” and Members’ oath of office to “faithfully discharge” their duties, I would predict that a court would be highly likely to find that Representatives and Senators owe fiduciary-like duties of trust and confidence to a host of parties who may be regarded as the source of material nonpublic congressional knowledge. Such duties of trust and confidence may be owed to, among others:

  • the citizen-investors they serve;
  • the United States;
  • the general public;
  • Congress, as well as the Senate or the House;
  • other Members of Congress; and
  • federal officials outside of Congress who rely on a Member’s loyalty and integrity.

There is precious little in federal statutes, regulations, and case law on the nature–no less the object–of any fiduciary the Director of the FBI may have.  The authorizing statute and regulations provide little illumination.  Federal court opinions give us little more.  See, e.g., Banks v. Francis, No. 2:15-CV-1400, 2015 WL 9694627, at *3 (W.D. Pa. Dec. 18, 2015), report and recommendation adopted, No. CV 15-1400, 2016 WL 110020 (W.D. Pa. Jan. 11, 2016) (“Plaintiff does not identify any specific, mandatory duty that the federal officials — Defendants Hornak, Brennan, and the FBI Director— violated; he merely refers to an overly broad duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution and to see justice done.”).  Accordingly, any applicable fiduciary duty likely would arise out of agency or other common law.  Section 8.01 of the Restatement (Third) of Agency provides “An agent has a fiduciary duty to act loyally for the principal’s benefit in all matters connect with the agency relationship.”  

But who is the principal in any divined agency relationship involving the FBI Director?  

A bit more than a year ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference on corporate criminal liability at the Stetson University College of Law.  The short papers from the conference were published in a subsequent issue of the Stetson Law Review.  This was the second time that Ellen Podgor, a friend and white collar crime scholar on the Stetson Law faculty, invited me to produce a short work on corporate criminal liability for publication in a dedicated edition of the Stetson Law Review.  (The first piece I published in the Stetson Law Review reflected on corporate personhood in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United opinion.  It has been downloaded and cited a surprising number of times.  So, I welcomed the opportunity to publish with the law review a second time.)

For the 2016 conference, I chose to focus on the reckless conduct of employees and its capacity to generate corporate criminal insider trading liability for the employer.  The abstract for the resulting paper, (Not) Holding Firms Criminally Responsible for the Reckless Insider Trading of their Employees (recently posted to SSRN), is as follows:

Criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 is the root of corporate criminal liability for insider trading in the United States. In the wake of assertions that S.A.C. Capital Advisors, L.P. actively encouraged the unlawful use of material nonpublic information in the conduct of its business, the line between employer and employee criminal liability for insider trading becomes both tenuous and salient. An essential question emerges: when do we criminally prosecute the firm for the unlawful conduct of its employees?

The possibility that reckless employee conduct may result in the employer’s willful violation of Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 (and, therefore, criminal liability for that employer firm) motivates this article. The article first reviews the basis for criminal enforcement of the insider trading prohibitions established in Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5 and describes the basis and rationale for corporate criminal liability (a liability that derives from the activities of agents undertaken in the course of the firm’s business). Then, it reflects on that basis and rationale by identifying the potential for corporate criminal liability for the reckless insider trading violations of employees under Section 10(b) and Rule 10b–5, arguing against that liability, and suggesting ways to eliminate it.

I was not the only conference participant concerned about the criminal liability of an employer for the insider trading conduct of an employee.  John Anderson, who co-led an insider trading discussion group with me at the 2017 Association of American Law Schools annual meeting back in January and also enjoys exploring criminal insider trading issues, contributed his research on the overcriminalization of insider trading at the conference.  His paper, When Does Corporate Criminal Liability for Insider Trading Make Sense?, identifies the same overall problem as my article does (employer criminal liability for insider trading based on employee conduct).  However, he views both the problem and the potential solutions more broadly.  

Last week, a reporter interviewed me regarding conflict minerals.The reporter specifically asked whether I believed there would be more litigation on conflict minerals and whether the SEC’s lack of enforcement would cause companies to stop doing due diligence. I am not sure which, if any, of my remarks will appear in print so I am posting some of my comments below:

I expect that if conflict minerals legislation survives, it will take a different form. The SEC asked for comments at the end of January, and I’ve read most of the comment letters. Many, including Trillium Asset Management, focus on the need to stay the course with the Rule, citing some success in making many mines conflict free. Others oppose the rule because of the expense. However, it appears that the costs haven’t been as high as most people expected, and indeed many of the tech companies such as Apple and Intel have voiced support for the rule. It’s likely that they have already operationalized the due diligence. The SEC has limits on what it can do, so I expect Congress to take action, unless there is an executive order from President Trump, which people have been expecting since February. 
 
The Senate

…

As a business lawyer in private practice, I found it very frustrating when the principals of business entity clients acted in contravention of my advice.  This didn’t happen too often in my 15 years of practice.  But when it did, I always wondered whether I could have stopped the madness by doing something differently in my representation of the client.

Thanks to friend and Wayne State University Law School law professor Peter Henning, who often writes on insider trading and other white collar crime issues for the New York Times DealBook (see, e.g., this recent piece), I had the opportunity to revisit this issue through my research and present that research at a symposium at Wayne Law back in the fall of 2015.  The law review recently published the resulting short article, which I have posted to SSRN.  The abstract is set forth below.

Sometimes, business entity clients and their principals do not seek, accept, or heed the advice of their lawyers. In fact, sometimes, they expressly disregard a lawyer’s instructions on how to proceed. In certain cases, the client expressly rejects the lawyer’s advice. However, some business constituents who take action contrary to the advice of legal counsel…

Earlier this month, the EU announced plans to implement its version of conflict minerals legislation, which covers all “conflict-affected and high-risk areas” around the world. Once approved by the Council of the EU, the law will apply to all importers into the EU of minerals or metals containing or consisting of tin, tantalum, tungsten, or gold (with some exceptions). Compliance and reporting will begin in January 2021. Importers must use OECD due diligence standards, report on their progress to suppliers and the public, and use independent third-party auditors. President Trump has not yet issued an executive order on Dodd-Frank §1502, aka conflict minerals, but based on a leaked memo, observers believe that it’s just a matter of time before that law is repealed here in the U.S. So why is there a difference in approach?

In response to a request for comments from the SEC, the U.S Chamber of Commerce, which led the legal battle against §1502, claimed, “substantial evidence shows that the conflict minerals rule has exacerbated the humanitarian crisis on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…The reports public companies are mandated to file also contribute to ―information overload and create further disincentives…

As you may know, I have had an abiding curiosity about the line between the U.S  private and public securities markets in large part because of my work on crowdfunding.  Almost three years ago, I published a post on the topic here at the BLPB.  I posted on the referenced paper here.  That paper recently was republished in a slightly updated form by The Texas Journal of Business Law,  the official publication of the Business Law Section of the State Bar of Texas (available here).

As a result of this work, my interest was (perhaps unsurprisingly) piqued by a this paper by Amy and Bert Westbrook.  Enticingly titled “Unicorns, Guardians, and the Concentration of the U.S. Equity Markets,” the article documents concentrations in both private and public equity markets in the United States and makes a number of interesting observations.  I was especially intrigued by the article’s identification of a potential resulting peril of this market concentration: the aggregation of both corporate management and ownership in the hands of the few.

[W]ealth has concentrated and private equity markets have emerged that serve as alternatives to the public equity market. At the same time, the public equity market has become dominated by highly concentrated shareholding, in…

Virginia E. Harper Ho has posted “The SEC’s Sustainability Imperative” on SSRN.  You can download the paper here.  Here is the abstract:

In 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the first time sought public comment on whether financial disclosure reform should address indicators of firms’ sustainability risks and practices. Securities disclosure reform now appears poised to take a deregulatory turn, and innovations at the intersection of sustainability and finance appear unlikely in the face of new policy priorities. Whether the SEC should take any steps to improve how sustainability-related information is disclosed to investors is also deeply contested.

This Article argues that the SEC nonetheless faces a sustainability imperative, first to address this issue in the near term as part of its ongoing review of the reporting framework for financial disclosure, and second, to promote disclosure of material sustainability information within financial reports in furtherance of its core statutory mandate. This conclusion rests on evidence that the current state of sustainability disclosure is inadequate for investment analysis and that these deficiencies are largely problems of comparability and quality, which cannot readily be addressed by private ordering, nor by deference to policymaking at the state level. This Article…

Most of us editors here at the Business Law Prof Blog obsess and blog in one way or another about disclosure issues.  Marcia has written passionately about conflict minerals disclosure (see a recent post here) and the SEC’s efforts to revamp–or at least reconsider–Regulation S-K (including here).  Anne also wrote about the Regulation S-K revision efforts here.  Ann wrote about mining industry disclosures here and focuses ongoing attention on securities litigation issues in the disclosure realm (including, e.g. here).  Josh wrote about the intersection of corporate governance and disclosure regulation in this post.  I have written about “disclosure creep” here and most of my research and writing has a disclosure bent to it, one way or another . . . .

Last summer, at the National Business Law Scholars Conference at The University of Chicago Law School, I listened with some fascination to the presentation of an early-stage project by Todd Henderson (whose work always makes me think–and this was no exception).  His thesis¹ was a deceptively simple one: that the age-old disclosure debate could best be solved by creating a contextual market for disclosure (rather than by, e.g., continuing its the current system of “federal government mandates and…