Corporate governance - Vigil

While some progress is being made in adding gender diversity to boards and executive officer positions of Canadian public companies, progress remains slow, as found by the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) in their recently published CSA Multilateral Staff Notice 58-313 Review of Disclosure Regarding Women on Boards and in Executive Officer Positions (Notice)

Member-driven think tank, The Conference Board Asia, has launched the research programme and public engagement component of its flagship Asia Corporate Leadership Council. The Council is a strategic, CEO-level programme designed to establish and promote best practices on corporate purpose in Asia. 

Countries hit comparatively hard during the financial crisis, helped also by domestic and European policies, are bouncing back from the pandemic faster than their peers.

La demande est forte pour les actions de Coveo, s’il faut se fier aux commandes faites jusqu’ici par les investisseurs dans le cadre du premier appel public à l’épargne de l’entreprise de Québec spécialisée dans l’intelligence artificielle appliquée au commerce en ligne.

In recent years, shareholder and stakeholder activism has led to an increased focus on companies’ performance and disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. In 2017, we wrote about the need for the boardrooms of corporate Canada to proactively discuss climate change in order to meet stakeholder demands for information.

Many issuers are already providing disclosure on environmental issues. However, issuers may choose to voluntarily use one of many frameworks and standards[1] to assess and disclose climate-related information. Given the lack of uniformity across the frameworks and standards, investors are often left with limited and inconsistent information.

In September, insurance giant AIG became the latest high-profile corporation to bestow the additional title of chairman on its CEO, Peter Zaffino. 
 
“The AIG board of directors has great confidence in Peter’s ability to continue executing on AIG’s transformation and growth strategy designed to create long-term, sustainable value,” the board’s then-nonexecutive chairman, Douglas Steenland, said in a statement.
 
Microsoft combined the chair and CEO roles in June for Satya Nadella. Companies like Berkshire Hathaway, AmerisourceBergen and ExxonMobil all have CEOs who serve a dual role
 
But even so, splitting the jobs is widely considered a best practice by corporate governance experts.

Companies are pressing their suppliers to disclose data on greenhouse-gas emissions amid a struggle to more precisely account for something that’s hard to quantify: their pollution.

In our experience at Leap by McKinsey (see sidebar “Leap by McKinsey”), executives have plenty of explanations for why their new businesses fail to scale, from poor operations to insufficient talent to simply bad luck. But in many cases, these explanations are based on gut feeling or frustration looking for an outlet, not on a deep understanding of the facts. So we have reviewed more than 200 scaled corporate new businesses around the world to understand what the issues are.

Chief Executive Bobby Kotick also faces an SEC probe into how Activision handled reports of misconduct and disclosed them to the public.

In Rosenbaum v. CytoDyn Inc., the Delaware Court of Chancery, in an opinion by Vice Chancellor Slights, upheld a board’s decision to exclude stockholder nominees from being considered at CytoDyn’s annual meeting based on deficiencies in the stockholders’ notice required by the company’s advance notice bylaw. The court found that the board had not engaged in any manipulative or inequitable conduct in rejecting the nominees. Even though the board waited almost one month before notifying the stockholders of deficiencies in their nomination notice, the court emphasized that the stockholders had not submitted their notice until close to the deadline, which left no time to fix the deficiencies, and that the bylaw did not in any event require the board to engage in an iterative process with the proponent to fix deficiencies.

Rogers Communications Inc. said Chief Executive Joe Natale had left and was being replaced on an interim basis by former finance chief Tony Staffieri.

The company said it has begun searching for a permanent CEO and that Mr. Staffieri, who was fired in September, is a candidate. News of the management change was earlier reported by the Toronto Star.

Companies are paying higher wages, spending more for materials and absorbing record freight costs, pushing up economic inflation gauges. They are also reporting some of their best profitability in years.

Executives are seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses, after decades of grinding down costs and prices.

Board directors are more involved with DE&I than ever before and they are expanding the breadth and depth of the metrics they use to track progress, according to a new report, Directors, Prepare for More: Tracking, Reporting, and Incentivizing DE&I, from the Women Corporate Directors Foundation (WCD) and Pearl Meyer, an executive compensation consultancy.

If companies practice and maintain better Corporate Governance procedures, management may tend to make better decisions. Many of those decisions take into account shareholders, plus employees and the community. That’s the upside. However, if policies favor Management’s interests over shareholders’, this presents obvious downside risk.

After COP26, and as the debate on whether Glasgow represents a success or a failure dies down, what next for global climate action?

L’action de Marché Goodfood perdait près de 30 % mercredi matin, après que l’entreprise montréalaise a reconnu que l’assouplissement des mesures sanitaires avait freiné sa croissance cet été. Le spécialiste des mets prêts à cuisiner espère que l’épicerie en ligne redonnera un élan à ses activités.

The cries for Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick to depart are getting louder. Both a group of employees and shareholders (who own a total of 4.8 million shares) are calling for the ouster of the head of the video game publisher. But getting rid of him wouldn’t necessarily be cheap.

With more than 20 years in the risk management business, the risk climate looks like something I have never seen before. The emergence of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2008 catapulted the banking world into overdrive. We have previously experienced pressure to incorporate social responsibility initiatives into our organizations, including minimizing our environmental footprint. Fast-forward to today, and we see a huge surge in ensuring that organizations are acting responsibly toward social diversity, equity and inclusion as well as a whole host of environmental metrics.

In most large firms, digital transformations are failing. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap in terms of profit and market capitalization was widening between those firms that had mastered the dynamics of the digital economy and those that were still being managed in an industrial-era manner. The pandemic accelerated digital adoption and widened the gap even further. It accentuated the rapid scaling, the network effects, and the winner-take-all dynamic of the digital economy and further separated the winners from losers, even in sectors that were once non-tech.

Activist investors competing to join a company’s board of directors could get a boost for their campaigns under a plan approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Revisions to corporate-ballot rules the SEC finalized on Wednesday requires companies to give shareholders a “universal ballot,” a single ballot listing all candidates in a contested board election. Currently, voters in contested elections receive two sets of ballots, each featuring a rival slate of board candidates.

For Vania Barbosa it is getting harder to afford the basics. The 40-year-old single mother from the outskirts of Brasília used to buy a kilo of minced beef or knuckle weekly, but has now switched to cheaper cuts just once a month.

“Each week you go for groceries there are different prices,” the restaurant worker said. “Sometimes I have to take out a piece of fruit, a mango, or remove the box of soap and not do the laundry until the following week.”

North America’s most trusted strategic shareholder advisory firm, today released its 2021 Proxy Season Review, highlighting the major events and key trends affecting shareholder activism and corporate governance.