Corporate governance - Vigil

Deloitte is under investigation over its auditing of Essar Oil UK, the owner of the Stanlow oil refinery that produces 16 per cent of the fuel used on British roads.

Prompted by a complaint in August, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales has begun examining whether Deloitte should have raised its concerns about Essar Oil UK’s governance earlier than it did, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.

Deal returns lossmaking carrier to original founders 68 years after it was nationalised

For a decade after the financial crisis the world economy’s problem was a lack of spending. Worried households paid down their debts, governments imposed austerity and wary firms held back investment, especially in physical capacity, while hiring from a seemingly infinite pool of workers. Now spending has come roaring back, as governments have stimulated the economy and consumers let rip. The surge in demand is so powerful that supply is struggling to keep up. Lorry drivers are getting signing bonuses, an armada of container ships is anchored off California waiting for ports to clear and energy prices are spiralling upwards. As rising inflation spooks investors, the gluts of the 2010s have given way to a shortage economy.

The spectacle of the spac, or “special-purpose acquisition company”, has preoccupied bankers on Wall Street over the past year. This is in part because the vehicles, which list a shell company on stockmarkets and raise a pot of capital before hunting for a private company to merge with, are often touted by their backers as an alternative to an initial public offering (ipo). Big banks make meaty fees from their ipo businesses. For some, the fact that spacs have muscled in is an unwelcome development. As voracious buyers of private firms, though, spacs are attracting as much attention among the private-equity (pe) barons on New York’s Park Avenue as on Wall Street.

Months before Cristiano Amon started as CEO of Qualcomm Inc., he already was at work on his first crisis. To solve it, he sat in a mostly empty meeting room in Taipei and pleaded with executives from one of the world’s biggest semiconductor makers for more chips.

Corporations use stock buybacks as a means to unlock value by returning surplus cash to investors. In turn, these investors can deploy the capital to more productive uses. The popularity of stock buyback programs has attracted significant attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners. Some vocal opponents conjecture that stock buybacks necessarily reduce investment and harm non-investor stakeholders such as employees. Although a large body of academic literature overwhelmingly refutes these claims, such vocal criticisms persist and have led some to calls for limits via taxing stock buybacks or outright bans on open market repurchases.

One of the world’s toughest hedge fund bosses has once again questioned the performance of GlaxoSmithKline Plc and its under-fire chief executive officer, Emma Walmsley. 

Gordon Singer, head of Elliott Investment Management’s London office, asked Glaxo Chairman Jonathan Symonds to explain what was holding back Glaxo’s value creation and stock during a meeting with top shareholders Thursday, according to a person on the call, who didn’t want to be identified because the event was private.

KKR & Co. named Snap Inc. co-founder Evan Spiegel as an independent director on its 15-member board.

The private-equity firm, with $429 billion of assets, now has 11 independent directors, New York-based KKR said Wednesday in a statement. 

The world’s largest asset manager is set to allow big pension funds and other sophisticated institutional clients to directly vote on issues from executive pay to climate change at annual meetings in a move BlackRock says will apply to nearly half of the $4.8tn of index equity assets it currently manages.

BlackRock’s decision on proxy voting — where investors have a say at annual meetings — will kick in next year and is the first step by a major asset manager to provide the ultimate owner of votes in a company the right to use them.

We are experiencing a profound shift in stakeholder expectations and business growth strategy: Sustainability is more important than ever before. Younger, high-growth companies — those that either are privately held or recently went public — face unique challenges and opportunities as they expand business while also considering environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, be it climate change, privacy, diversity or a range of other material issues. 

Chinese Estates Holding, a Hong Kong-based property group, has announced an offer to take the business private after its exposure to heavily indebted developer China Evergrande crushed its share price.

It looks like the perfect time to be a chipmaker. The market for semiconductors continues to grow rapidly. By the end of the decade it will exceed $1trn globally, up from $500bn this year, forecasts vlsi Research, a firm of analysts. Demand keeps outstripping supply; the chip shortage is now expected to last well into 2023, paralysing factories of everything that needs processors—which in this day and age is basically everything.

In a 2020 paper reported in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, the authors identify an increasing risk that legal liabilities will arise around general corporate ESG disclosures.

One form that these cases take is that of securities class actions. In a ground-breaking report from December 2020, the ISS Securities Class Action Services (SCAS) team identified a growing trend for actions to be event-driven, and based on ESG-related incidents.

Advisers to a group of international investors in Evergrande say the heavily indebted Chinese developer has not meaningfully engaged with them or provided details of potential asset sales despite their requests, as they braced themselves for a looming default.

Hui Ka Yan who was once the embodiment of success, now faces a stunning reversal of fortunes

Tech titans came to Ireland for its tax lures – but may now stay despite Dublin’s agreement to raise its rates

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 was socially divisive as well as economically destructive. It inspired a resentful backlash, exemplified by America’s Tea Party. That crisis at least had the tact to spread financial pain across the rich as well as the poor, however. The share of global wealth held by the top “one percent” actually fell in 2008. The pandemic has been different. Amid all the misery and mortality, the number of millionaires rose last year by 5.2m to over 56m, according to the Global Wealth Report published by Credit Suisse, a bank. The one percent increased their share of wealth to 45%, a percentage point higher than in 2019.

China Evergrande Group’s path to the brink of default was littered with financial red flags. The property giant carried heavy debt loads, grew at breakneck pace and made it hard for outsiders to understand the company’s financial situation.

But a combination of financial regulators, local Chinese governments, yield-hungry investors and insiders kept the critics at bay. Ultimately, the only pressure that Evergrande couldn’t resist came from Beijing.

Activist funds that pushed an organization to make a strategic or operational change noticed a median outperformance, whereas a deal with governance calls for noticed a median underperformance, analysis by Alvarez & Marsal discovered

Activist buyers have a really combined document relying on what sort of modifications they push for, new analysis has discovered, whereas the method has proved more practical within the UK than the US or Europe.

Business leaders from across the world will convene for the B20 Summit in Rome this week to hand over recommendations to the Italian G20 Presidency. At the same time, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in corporate governance driven by the rise of hyper-transparency in modern society. Levels of political and employee activism are rising, as are popular protests about corruption, environmental justice, equity and equality. Increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technology across all industries has resulted in ethical concerns about issues such as privacy and authenticity. Green growth, climate and social justice imperatives, and the severe economic crisis generated by COVID-19, have all intensified and expanded the various forms of public intervention in economic systems.

Everywhere I go there, seems to be unanimous consensus that the answer to how to anchor ESG is integration: Fully integrating ESG in the business model of the company and ensuring that environmental, social and governance issues are considered across the board.

But the devil is always in the detail, so the question is what it really means to integrate ESG across the business. There might be many answers to this question, but in my mind, there is only one efficient way forward, which is a full and complete integration.

At the helm of an organisation’s strategic direction, performance and growth trajectory, the C-suite team holds massive responsibility towards employees, customers and shareholders. For banking and financial services companies, the stakes get higher – pre-pandemic, the financial services industry contributed £132 billion to the UK economy in 2019 and, consequently, will also play a major role in post-Covid economic revival. There is little room for costly mistakes or delays.  

That’s why decisions made at leadership level must be informed by solid, relevant data-led insights rather than instinct or by relying on what has worked successfully in the past.

IAC’s digital media arm Dotdash on Wednesday agreed to buy Meredith Corp MDP-N +6.56%increase
in a deal valued at about $2.7-billion, bringing titles such as People, Allrecipes and Investopedia under one umbrella.

The combined company is to be called Dotdash Meredith and will be led by Dotdash top boss Neil Vogel, the companies said.

For economics writing—a genre that stylistically is often closer to computer manuals than to literature—a discussion paper recently posted on the Federal Reserve’s website is a blessed relief. Jeremy Rudd, a Fed researcher, includes quotations from William Butler Yeats and Dashiell Hammett. He uses such phrases as “ill-tempered pettifogging” and “arrant nonsense”. And, as if channelling David Foster Wallace, he has fun in his footnotes, notably one in which he casually observes that mainstream economics may serve as “an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable and unjust social order”. Little wonder his paper has become, by central-bank standards, a social-media sensation.

Twitter Inc. is selling mobile ad firm MoPub to AppLovin Corp. for $1.05 billion in cash, the company said Wednesday.

MoPub allows app publishers to make money by selling ad slots on their apps, and helps advertisers reach certain audiences on mobile apps, among other offerings.