Corporate governance - Vigil

Starboard Value, a fund that took aim at Yahoo, has found another target for its activism.

Thank you Jina [Choi] for that kind introduction and for your leadership of the San Francisco Regional Office. It is always good to be back at Stanford, and it is an honor to speak at the SEC’s and Rock Center’s Silicon Valley Initiative. This is an important event that brings together regulators, academics, lawyers and entrepreneurs to discuss the issues impacting the start-up, venture capital and private equity worlds rooted here in this cutting edge center of technological innovation. It is essential that the Commission fully engage with Silicon Valley, and participants in this important market across the country, so that we can better understand the unique features of its investors and financings. This Valley-SEC dialogue, which I hope becomes a permanent fixture, can only make the Commission a more effective regulator and better able to protect all investors.

Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels and worse — all have turned up at Delaware addresses, no questions asked, hoping to cover their tracks and skirt regulations.

Activist Starboard Value VP has gained attention for its turnaround at Olive Garden parent Darden Restaurants Inc., but one key change has been its push to separate the company's real estate into a new publicly traded company.

From the perspective of the SEC’s mission to protect investors, there could hardly be anything more important than strong mutual fund boards when more than 53 million households—approximately 43 percent of all U.S. households—owned mutual funds in 2015. Mutual fund investors are like anyone else—they find their time consumed by jobs, family obligations, and the myriad of other priorities we face in today’s world. They are lucky if they can make it to the gym in their spare time. So, to expect most investors to closely follow the performance of their fund investments, let alone their fee structure, management changes and investment risks, would be unrealistic. And, of course, it is fund directors, not fund investors, who have access to the information and critical participants, like the fund adviser, that makes strong and meaningful oversight possible.

End of Pfizer's tax-cutting "inversion" buy of fellow drug maker would come after Obama and Treasury Dept. took aim at such agreements

Chairman of the Board Mike Fucci gives his insight into how a company with a strong board of directors can impact the present and forge the future.

There were 80 securities class action settlements approved in 2015, the highest number since 2010, according to a new report from Cornerstone Research. The report, Securities Class Action Settlements—2015 Review and Analysis, shows that total settlement dollars rose to more than $3 billion, an increase of 184 percent over the historic low in 2014.

Hedge fund activism is the latest rave in corporate governance. Activist hedge funds build stakes in target firms in order to press management for various changes. When managers are uncooperative, they may just be forced to step down.

In the latest chapter of a case that has been closely followed by the private equity community for over four years, a Federal District Court in Massachusetts held on remand from the First Circuit in Sun Capital Partners III, et al v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Industry Pension Fund, 10-10921-DPW (D. Mass. March 28, 2016), that non-parallel private equity funds with the same sponsor are jointly and severally liable for the multiemployer pension plan withdrawal liability of a portfolio company in which they both invest under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”), where the funds together indirectly owned 100% of the portfolio company. The First Circuit decision is discussed in our memorandum of July 29, 2013.

From Yahoo Finance: WASHINGTON, April 05, 2016-- According to The Family Business Institute, 88% of current family business owners believe the same family will control their business in five years. However, o nly 30% of famil

High-stakes uncertainty takes many forms. Organizations that prepare for uncertainty can lead with confidence and distance themselves from competitors.