Corporate governance - Vigil

Edward Rogers has received inquiries from Ontario’s securities watchdog amid uncertainty over the leadership of Rogers Communications Inc., according to a letter sent to the Toronto-based telecom on Monday by a lawyer representing Mr. Rogers.

A dispute over which independent directors currently sit on the board of Canada’s largest wireless carrier has caused the company’s stock price to fall and triggered downgrades from analysts, says the letter, which urges the company to respond swiftly to a legal petition Mr. Rogers plans to file in the B.C. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

One of Canada’s largest pension fund managers has unveiled plans for a C$15bn ($12bn) spending spree on private assets in the UK and Europe in a significant expansion of its efforts to drive up returns offshore.

Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec (CDPQ), the C$400bn global investment group, told the Financial Times that it plans to deploy around those funds to the region over the next four years, with the UK standing out because of its “pro business” stance.

The co-head of Blackstone Inc.’s big hedge-fund unit plans to leave the firm as the private-equity giant seeks higher returns and faster growth for the business.

Blackstone veteran John McCormick told the firm last week he had decided to resign, the firm told The Wall Street Journal. His co-head, former Brown University endowment chief and hedge-fund manager Joseph Dowling, who joined the firm in January, will become sole head of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, the world’s largest funds-of-hedge-funds business.

Le bras immobilier de la Caisse de dépôt et placement, Ivanhoé Cambridge, poursuit la transformation de son parc immobilier avec la vente de ses participations dans l’un des plus récents immeubles de bureaux du centre-ville de Montréal.

Sustainable investing may be gratifying for wealthy individuals and families, but it is far from simple. A lack of standards in the measurement and reporting of ESG (environmental, social and governance) products and funds can leave investors confused. And when it comes to impact investments, capturing the right data takes time, effort and, often, a hands-on approach.

After a year of disruption, chief executive officers in Canada’s financial services industry are feeling optimistic. Our 24th CEO Survey found they were more optimistic than Canadian CEOs overall and financial services executives worldwide on key questions like their expectations for global economic growth during the next 12 months. A significant portion of Canadian financial services CEOs expect both revenue (79%) and profit (65%) growth during the same time period.

According to the Financial Times, “[p]ension funds and retail investors have complained for years over their lack of ability to vote at annual meetings when using an asset manager.” Last week, BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the galaxy with $9.5 trillion under management, announced that, beginning in 2022, it will begin to “expand the opportunity for clients to participate in proxy voting decisions.” BlackRock said that it has been developing this capability in response “to a growing interest in investment stewardship from our clients,” enabling clients “to have a greater say in proxy voting, if that is important to [them].” BlackRock will make the opportunity available initially to institutional clients invested in index strategies—almost $2 trillion of index equity assets in which over 60 million people invest across the globe. It is also looking at expanding “proxy voting choice to even more investors, including those invested in ETFs, index mutual funds and other products.” Will this be a good thing?

On October 13, 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) announced a proposed rulemaking to amend the Investment Duties regulation under Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”) that would clarify the application of ERISA’s plan fiduciary duties of prudence and loyalty to selecting investments and investment courses of action, including selecting qualified default investment alternatives (“QDIAs”), and to exercising shareholder rights, including proxy voting. [1] While the proposal retains the core principle that the duties of prudence and loyalty require ERISA fiduciaries to focus on material risk-return factors, the proposal is intended to remove barriers implemented by the prior administration that the DOL believes limited fiduciaries’ ability to consider climate change and other ESG matters as factors when selecting investments and exercising shareholder rights. Title I governs private pension plans.

Edward Rogers was reappointed chair of Rogers Communications Inc. at a Sunday board meeting that was called invalid by three rival family members as well as the five company directors who Mr. Rogers says he has now replaced.

Ten years ago Dublin was nicknamed Silicon Valley’s “home from home” with tech superstars including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk queueing up to snap up office space, avail themselves of local Irish hospitality and low tax.

But while the decision of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eBay, Amazon and more recently TikTok to locate their European headquarters in the Irish capital helped cement its reputation as one of the region’s leading tech hubs, questions are now being asked about whether they will stay.

Federal Reserve officials are set to wind down their $120 billion-a-month bond-purchase program in November, but questions over how soon inflation pressures will fade are creating more uneasiness inside the central bank.

Business activity accelerated in some of the world’s largest economies owing to a pickup in the services sector that has offset weakness in manufacturing caused by supply-chain bottlenecks and rising prices.

Surveys of purchasing managers conducted over recent weeks point to increased growth in the U.S., Japan and Australia due to easing fears of the Delta variant of Covid-19.

A battle for control of the board of Rogers Communications Inc, one of Canada's largest telecoms companies, is headed to court after rival factions claimed they were in charge following a family feud that erupted into the open.

Last week, the company's board voted to remove Edward Rogers, son of the late founder Ted Rogers, as chair after he tried to replace CEO Joe Natale with another executive. The move put him at odds with his sisters and mother.

Wealthy governments won’t fulfill a pledge to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries fight climate change until at least 2023, according to a new report from climate negotiators, a setback that comes just days before a closely watched United Nations climate summit starts in Scotland.

U.S. sports-betting operator walks away from offer to buy British competitor, saying decision follows negotiations with Entain’s leadership

In 2021 proxy voting by the largest asset managers remained wholly insufficient to the scale and urgency of the climate crisis, according to a new report by Majority Action. Following years of accountability efforts from clients, fellow shareholders, and climate advocates, substantial progress has been made in asset manager support for climate-related shareholder proposals. Despite this, benchmarking of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters by the investor initiative Climate Action 100+ demonstrates that the companies primarily responsible for the production and consumption of fossil fuels causing climate change are not on track to decarbonize their operations by 2050.

Citigroup has agreed to have a third party conduct a racial equity audit of the bank, six months after a significant number of its shareholders – though not a majority – voted for such a step. The move comes in a year when several US financial institutions have faced requests for racial equity audits amid growing investor scrutiny of diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) issues at US companies.

Warren Buffett warned against overpaying even the most brilliant CEO, shared his process for learning from bad acquisitions, and weighed in on why executives cheat and lie in an interview for "Talent, Strategy, Risk," a recent book by corporate-governance experts Ram Charan, Bill McNabb, and Dennis Carey.

Many investors are contemplating how to integrate environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues into their decisions. We surveyed more than 1,000 professionals around the world — including advisors, consultants and intermediaries — for an in-depth view of their perspectives.

For many people, proxy fights are almost synonymous with shareholder activism. But we view them as just one point on an activism continuum that also includes investors’ engagement with companies whose shares they hold, shareholder proposals, and more. Whenever an investor leverages their rights and privileges as an owner to influence a company’s practices or strategy, that’s shareholder activism.

Increasingly, investors of all kinds are using the full spectrum of activist tools to weigh in on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Indeed, it’s likely 2021 will be remembered as the year that ESG became a key part of shareholder activists’ strategies.

He tolerates you until he doesn’t, and once he’s mentally moved on, the breakup can be brutal. It’s the Edward Rogers doctrine.

Since his father, Ted, died in 2008, the same pattern has played out at Rogers Communications with three consecutive chief executives. The latest, Joe Natale, may yet survive. But even if he does, the company’s current CEO will be forced to manage with his hands tied. Edward wants him gone – and now, it seems, Rogers family confidantes like Phil Lind do, too.

Facebook’s senior executives interfered to allow US politicians and celebrities to post whatever they wanted on its social network despite pleas from employees to stop, leaked internal documents suggest.

Employees claim in the documents that while Facebook has long insisted that it is politically neutral, it allowed rightwing figures to break rules designed to curb misinformation and harmful content, after being stung by accusations of bias from conservatives.

Finance chiefs are boosting salaries and recruitment spending, offering more in the way of perks and expanding their equity plans as they joust to attract—and retain—workers.

Employees have quit their jobs in droves this year as the economy has picked up after last year’s pandemic slump. Workers handed in a seasonally adjusted 4.3 million resignations in August, a record since tracking began in 2000 that came after months of elevated departures, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jobless claims last week dropped to the lowest level since March 2020.

Inflation is about to ripple through the tax code—and the nation’s mishmash of tax provisions means some people will be hurt and some won’t.

As inflation trends near a 13-year high, middle-income workers will benefit from automatic annual adjustments to tax provisions such as the standard deduction for income taxes. Some other provisions are frozen in time, stuck to specific dollar amounts from decades ago. Those provisions tend to pinch higher-income households.

The bill for climate change is coming due, and it will be big. Businesses, investors and the U.S. government are planning to turn the country carbon neutral in the coming 30 years. They are also trying to limit and pay the cost of the climate change that has already occurred.