Corporate governance - Vigil

New legislation proposes changes to corporate governance in Alberta in a bid to make it the destination of choice for business in Canada, the province says.
Tabled in the legislature on Monday, the bill offers amendments to Alberta’s Business Corporations Act the province believes will align it with other jurisdictions.

Alberta would become the first Canadian province to offer corporate opportunity waivers, rules setting out when directors of companies can be involved in projects. A handful of jurisdictions in the U.S. offer similar waivers.

Almost a quarter (23 percent) of Fortune 100 firms say board evaluation is now an ongoing process and something that happens beyond the formal annual evaluation, according to EY.

This is an increase from just 9 percent in 2018, EY notes, adding that this ‘real-time evaluation’ allows companies to be ‘timely and agile’ to address issues more quickly and avoid a deepening of problems, as well as allowing ‘continuous improvement.’

Top executive didn’t inform board of some reports, including alleged rapes; company faces multiple regulatory investigations

The greening of Schneider Electric started in 2005. The French electrical equipment group announced it would review its “social and environment performance” and set up a “planet and society barometer”. In 2008 it even rebranded itself in lurid green.

“If you measure it, it happens,” Jean-Pascal Tricoire explained to Les Echos, the French business newspaper, in 2007, a year after taking over as chief executive.

The energy giant said Monday it wants to consolidate its dual British and Dutch structure into a single U.K.-based entity. It will lose its “Royal Dutch” tag and become plain Shell PLC. The move will help the company to accelerate buybacks and make portfolio changes as the energy transition picks up pace. What it won’t affect is a Dutch court ruling requiring the company to cut its emissions, though Shell might avoid other such cases once it leaves the Netherlands.

Activist investor Carl Icahn plans to nominate 10 directors at Southwest Gas Holdings Inc. on Monday in an attempt to replace the entire board. 

The billionaire investor, who owns a 4.9% stake in Southwest Gas, has been waging a battle at the Las Vegas utility after its announced deal to acquire the pipeline company Questar last month. 

Low wind speeds pushed peak hour power prices to the second highest level for at least three years on Monday as Britain’s grid was forced to increase its reliance on gas-fired power plants and draw on coal generation.

Canada’s telecom regulator has denied requests to delay a coming hearing into Rogers Communications Inc.’s $26-billion takeover of Shaw Communications Inc., after a B.C. Supreme Court ruling resolved uncertainty surrounding who sits on Rogers’s board.

American workers’ stampede toward the exits hasn’t let up. New data puts a finer point on who, exactly, is leaving jobs these days.

Workers resigned from a record 4.4 million jobs in September, according to Labor Department data, and new surveys show that low-wage workers, employees of color and women outside the management ranks are those most likely to change roles. The findings signal that turnover isn’t evenly spread across the U.S. workforce even as employers across industries struggle to fill a variety of roles.

CyrusOne Inc. is nearing a deal to be sold to a private-equity buyer that could value the data-center operator at more than $10 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

"Global M&A value reached USD1.51 trillion in Q2 2021 — an all-time quarterly apex and something few could have imagined at the start of the pandemic," said Ken Bisconti, Co-Head, SS&C Intralinks. "What the latest Global M&A Dealmakers Survey reveals is, rather than cooling, dealmakers' spirits remain high, and many anticipate the hot M&A market continues to increase in deal volume."

Royal Dutch Shell said on Monday it would scrap its dual share structure and move its head office to Britain from the Netherlands, pushed away by Dutch taxes and facing climate pressure in court as the energy giant shifts from oil and gas.

The company, which long faced questions from investors about its dual structure and had recently been hit by a Dutch court order over its climate targets, aims to drop “Royal Dutch” from its name – part of its identity since 1907 – to become Shell Plc.

As public company board service has become increasingly imperative and time-consuming, proxy advisory firms and institutional investors have sharpened their focus on directors who serve on an excessive number of boards. Overboarding concerns have become a key driver for recommendations or votes against director elections in recent years. For example, in its latest investment stewardship report, BlackRock reported that it voted against 163 directors at 149 companies in the Americas on the basis of overboarding from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021.

FEW CRISES highlight China’s weight in commodity markets as clearly as the global energy crunch. Though analysts attribute the shortages to many different causes, all mention China. Its post-covid economic recovery coupled with a hot summer produced a surge in demand for power. Supplies of its two main sources of electricity, coal and hydropower, were curbed by environmental crackdowns and droughts, respectively.

On October 19, a federal district court judge held a hearing on a motion for a preliminary injunction in Meland v. Weber, a case challenging SB 826, California’s board gender diversity statute, on the basis that it is unconstitutional under the equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. The judge had previously dismissed the case on the basis of lack of standing, but was reversed by the 9th Circuit. What did the hearing reveal?

When Charlotte Valeur was young, she felt different from other children. Growing up in Copenhagen, she was bullied “relentlessly” by schoolmates. An often silent girl, she moved to a class with less capable students.

She even felt apart from her three siblings. They did not keep little books full of numbers, or get excited when they spotted a new licence plate to record. “I was sort of on the outside. It was just . . . I was not like them.”

Senior management pay is increasingly linked to sustainability targets, but critics are sceptical this will amount to meaningful change.

Heineken has agreed to buy two African alcohol companies, broadening the beer giant’s exposure to a region considered among the world’s most attractive growth markets for booze.

International carbon markets got a shot in the arm in Glasgow on Saturday after governments agreed on long-stalled rules for how countries, and companies, can trade carbon-emissions credits across borders.

General Electric Co. , for decades the model of the modern corporation, is over.

This week, the diversified industrial colossus announced that it would break itself up into three specialized companies. What killed GE?

Our impressions of corporate decline and fall are skewed by flameouts like Enron Corp. in 2001, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 or Theranos Inc. in 2018. Such spectacular implosions make it seem that companies go from glory to failure in the blink of an eye.

China has been catching a lot of flak for not announcing more ambitious targets at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow: and for helping, along with India, to water down the language of the final text on coal.

Public ownership of shares is, in many ways, the essence of modern capitalism — which, along with the rule of law, has been responsible for the spectacular growth in global living standards over the past 200 years. Today, public ownership of shares is under significant pressure on a number of fronts.

A diminishing pool of public equity market investors is engaged in “active” investing (i.e., actually analyzing the merits of companies and selecting their securities accordingly). A growing plurality of investors chooses indices and engages in virtually no individual company or security analysis. This type of investing delegates security selection to small, anonymous committees at the index construction firms. Among the active investors are classic stock pickers at some mutual funds and hedge funds, a depleted cadre of analysts at investment banks and advisory firms, and a relatively small group of “activist” investors.

The 2021 U.S. Spencer Stuart Board Index finds boards responding to a growing chorus of calls for enhanced boardroom diversity, with men from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic communities and women comprising 72% of directors joining S&P 500 boards in the past year. But boardroom turnover remains persistently low, with new independent directors once again representing only 9% of all S&P 500 directors. As a result, changes to overall composition continue at a slow pace.