Corporate governance - Vigil

Canadian natural gas will soon be labelled with its country of origin, much like that “Grown in California” sticker on an orange from the local grocery store, says Mark Fitzgerald, outgoing chief executive officer of Petronas Energy Canada Ltd.

An Ontario court has denied an appeal by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and upheld an earlier ruling that the bank broke federal labour law by allowing employees to work unpaid overtime for years.

Iamgold Corp.’s biggest shareholder is backing an activist investor’s efforts to overhaul the struggling Canadian gold company’s board of directors.

While we agree that excessive corporate power poses a danger to the the functioning of modern democracies, like Kent Greenfield (see here) and others, we doubt that the proposed remedies are appropriate. To explain why, our new paper identifies and reconstructs three partially overlapping but analytically distinct justifications for corporate abolitionism, which we express in general terms, independently of specific Supreme Court decisions or policy debates.

In 2012, McDonald’s Corp. pledged to stop buying pork for its Bacon McDouble cheeseburgers, McRib sandwiches and the like by 2022 from producers who use small crates to constrain pregnant swine. Left unmentioned was that Mr. Icahn had pushed for the change behind the scenes.

The Justice Department said Tuesday it seized over $3.6 billion worth of digital currency stolen during a hack of a cryptocurrency exchange and arrested two suspects for allegedly trying to launder the proceeds.

As markets sour on speculative assets, a new exchange-traded fund is offering a twist on investing in special-purpose acquisition companies. Sometimes called “blank-check” vehicles, SPACs last year became Wall Street’s favorite way to list flashy ventures with no profits.

Equitable Group Inc. was already a fast-growing digital challenger in banking. With a $470-million deal to acquire Concentra Bank, it is looking to cement its place as a leading alternative to Canada’s biggest banks.

As the 2022 pipeline continues to flow, here’s a quick preview of where the tensions, action and hot spots will be in M&A this year, together with explanations of why this will be the case.

Toshiba Corp.’s revised plan to break into two parts instead of three might not fully satisfy foreign shareholders who want more radical restructuring but it offers an easier path for the company to divide itself.

In summary, we see no clear benefits resulting from the SEC’s involvement with societal impact disclosures, yet such disclosures create significant costs. Agencies such as the EPA, Labor Department, and EEOC are better equipped to set reporting requirements for outcomes such as carbon emissions or workforce diversity, and their regulations apply to a broader set of firms.

BlackBerry Ltd. chief executive officer John Chen plans to sell about a third of his shares in the company over the coming year, worth about US$22-million at current prices.

This was the largest CEO sustainability survey ever conducted between our organizations, with more than 1,230 respondents in 113 countries, including more than 400 respondents from the Global South (Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania), and it found that CEOs widely believe that business is unprepared to deal with climate change. Companies are facing climate-change disruption now – much earlier than expected.

Comparative data is presented for the S&P 100 companies and for the high technology and life science companies included in the SV 150, as well as trend information over the history of the survey.

After a deal that could have been worth $80 billion to his company fell apart, SoftBank Group Corp. Chief Executive Masayoshi Son is playing salesman for Plan B—an initial public offering of chip designer Arm.

The European lender with the most ambitious plans to create a U.S.-style full-service global investment bank these days is France’s BNP Paribas. Fourth-quarter results Tuesday showed what a challenge that can be.

Total household debt rose by $1.02 trillion last year, boosted by higher balances on home and auto loans, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday. It was the largest increase since a $1.06 trillion jump in 2007. Total consumer debt now sits at around $15.6 trillion, compared with $14.6 trillion a year earlier.

As the Bank of Canada prepares to shrink its bloated balance sheet, investors say the move could enable expected interest rate hikes to have more far-reaching impact on economic activity.

Ceres, a nonprofit organization focused on solving climate and sustainability challenges through coordinated action by capital market leaders, recently issued its 2022 Guidance for Engaging on Climate Risk Governance and Voting on Directors (guidance). 

Two of Unilever’s largest investors have called for a radical shake-up of the company or its board in the wake of its abortive £50bn pursuit of GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer health business.

An early-year tumble in major U.S. stock indexes has some investors searching for safety by dumping shares of high-growth technology stocks for stodgier businesses that pay shareholders cash, including banks, oil companies and telecoms. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission has subpoenaed Tesla Inc. for information about compliance with a court-ordered settlement requiring certain of Elon Musk’s tweets be preapproved.