Corporate governance - Vigil

TaaS, the first fully transparent 'closed-end' fund dedicated to investing in Blockchain assets schedules crowdfund for March 27 2017 via an Initial Coin Offering and plans to launch a 'Bloomberg-like' cryptocurrency portfolio management and analytics platform. Ex-Lehman Brothers banker involved.

By Martin Lipton A long-running, two-year effort by the senior corporate governance heads of major U.S. investors to develop the first stewardship code for the U.S. market culminated today in the launch of the Investor Stewardship Group (ISG) and ISG’s associated Framework for U.S. Stewardship and Governance. Investor co-founders and signatories include U.S. Asset Managers…

In 2016, companies, governments, and consumers were again challenged to navigate an evolving landscape of cybersecurity and privacy issues.  This year saw flash points impacting the trajectory for data breach litigation, the future for privacy class actions, and the scope of government powers to both regulate data collection practices and gather data itself.  Cybersecurity also burst onto the international regulatory and political scene.

Leo E. Strine, Jr., Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, the Austin Wakeman Scott Lecturer on Law and a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, recently issued an article that is forthcoming in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. The article, titled Corporate Power is Corporate Purpose I: Evidence from My Hometown, is available here. The abstract of Chief Justice Strine’s essay summarizes it as follows:

Is it possible to rapidly increase shareholder value and promote diverse boards at the same time? Is a homogeneous board an indicator of an underperforming company? 

The theoretical agency literature highlights the importance of risk-related agency conflicts—whereby undiversified executives are more averse to firm-specific risk than are diversified shareholders—as a potential source of wealth destruction.

Focused explicitly on combating short-termism, providing a “framework for promoting long-term value creation for U.S. companies and the broader U.S. economy” and promoting “responsible” engagement, the principles are designed to be independent of proxy advisory firm guidelines and may help disintermediate the proxy advisory firms, traditional activist hedge funds and short-term pressures from dictating corporate governance and corporate strategy.

Medical-helicopter company Air Methods Corp. is exploring a potential sale, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Investor Stewardship Group (link), a collective of some of the largest U.S.-based institutional investors and global asset managers, along with several of their international counterparts, announced the launch of the Framework for U.S. Stewardship and Governance, a historic, sustained initiative to establish a framework of basic standards of investment stewardship and corporate governance for U.S. institutional investor and boardroom conduct.

Any attempt to assess the past six months is undeniably going to be overshadowed by what lies ahead. The change in administration is likely to be as tumultuous and unpredictable for the SEC as for any other federal agency, and the differences between the enforcement priorities under Chair Mary Jo White and Enforcement Division Director Andrew Ceresney and those of their successors may be more stark than other SEC transitions in recent years.

President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive action that establishes a framework for scaling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, part of a sweeping plan to dismantle much of the regulatory system put in place after the financial crisis.​