Corporate governance - Vigil

Bank of East Asia, a Hong Kong-based lender, said Friday it intends to pay up to the equivalent of about $373 million to purchase all the shares held by U.S. activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. in an off-market transaction

When the world’s leading appliance manufacturer, the Haier Group Corporation announced that it was abolishing almost all of its 12,000 managerial positions and reorganizing some 70,000 staff into some 4,000 micro-enterprises, each with its own head executive, balance sheet, and clientele, it naturally attracted attention. The firm’s CEO, Zhang Ruimin, appeared at the Drucker Forum in 2018 and 2019, explaining the decision and the philosophy behind it.

We have encouraged our portfolio companies to report in accordance with recommendations of the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) [1] since we first endorsed the framework in 2017. Since then, companies have improved the quality and quantity of climate-related disclosure and investors have matured their expectations. Yet, there is more progress to be made.

Private-fund managers sometimes give investors misleading information about fees and performance, said the Securities and Exchange Commission, which highlighted several types of violations found by examiners as the regulator considers stronger rules for private-equity and hedge-fund managers.

The work of Frank Easterbrook and Dan Fischel influenced a generation or more of corporate law scholars and, perhaps more important, powerful players in American corporate governance like institutional investors and government policy makers. It is impossible to consider the path that American corporate governance has taken without acknowledging the impact of their thinking, and the ballast their arguments gave to those who drove policies designed to make American public companies more responsive to the immediate demands of the stock market and to tilt governance towards one that would transmit the desires of stockholders, particularly institutional investors with clout, more consistently and rapidly into corporate policy.

Investors in The Walt Disney Company will vote on shareholder proposals at its March 19 AGM, including one seeking disclosure around pay equity. It is an issue that has attracted greater attention in recent years partly as a result of the inequitable impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on communities of color and the 2020 protests against racial injustice.

With some exceptions, 2021 was a generally strong year for equity markets around the world. Impressively, passive ESG products such as ETFs garnered significant inflows of over $150 billion dollars and saw asset under management growth of over 80% globally. In 2021, ISS ESG marked the one-year anniversary of our initial proprietary index launches, the ISS ESG US Diversity Index and the Governance QualityScore (QGS) Index family. We also launched our ISS ESG EVA Leaders Index family, an innovative index approach combining corporate sustainability with economic profitability.

Last year, China’s tech stocks cratered. This year, America’s are following suit. But their selloffs have very different drivers, and therein lies a potential inflection point in the emerging competition between the two countries.

Logitech’s better-than-expected quarterly results may have been stronger without the ongoing supply chain challenges, CEO Bracken Darrell told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.

Mark Carney, the former head of the central banks of the U.K. and Canada and the United Nations’ point man on climate change and finance, has taken on a new role advising companies on the global economy with Macro Advisory Partners, a consulting firm.

When interest in blockchain began to accelerate a few years ago, the expectations surrounding its uses were lofty. Blockchain was touted as technology that could fix our supply chains, our healthcare system and even our democracy. Yet, when the experiments conducted on potential blockchain applications, including pilot programs conducted in the financial services and banking industry, fell short of these expectations, industry interest in blockchain use cases waned. In some cases, those interested in blockchain technology found that traditional, centralized databases could provide the same functionalities as blockchain at a lower cost.

We explain why investors working towards sustainability objectives must ensure that their portfolio companies are conducting political engagement in a responsible manner. We include high-level principles on what this activity entails, based on existing views in academic and practitioner literature. We also discuss the key findings from the PRI-supported research, undertaken by the OECD, that maps out political engagement regulations across selected jurisdictions.

Home Depot is tapping its operating chief to replace Craig Menear as chief executive, as the home-improvement retailer looks to enter its next phase of growth in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Elon Musk is betting that he can turn Tesla into one of the world’s largest car makers while selling just a handful of models, challenging a long-held auto-industry belief that it takes a diverse stable of updated models to attract buyers.

173 campaigns launched globally in 2021, in line with 2020’s slower pace; capital deployed by activists was also roughly flat Y-o-Y ($42bn vs. $40bn)

Critics of mandatory public disclosure often argue that it may put disclosing firms at a competitive disadvantage by requiring them to  reveal potentially proprietary information to rivals. For instance, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) proposed to mandate more disaggregated disclosure of segment information, many firms lobbied vigorously against the new rule (SFAS No. 131), arguing that it would be “competitively harmful to the reporting enterprise” (FASB 1997).

Tony Staffieri, the new chief executive officer of Rogers Communications Inc. , has vowed to make the changes needed to improve the telecom and media giant’s performance as it seeks to close its $26-billion takeover of Shaw Communications Inc. during the second quarter.

BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisors (“State Street”) recently issued their voting policy updates for 2022, as well as guidance about their 2022 priorities for their portfolio companies. 

Costco Wholesale Corp. shareholders voted Thursday for a proposal that called on the retailer to set out plans to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 or sooner, in line with scientific recommendations to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

General Motors said it will invest roughly $6.6 billion in its home state of Michigan through 2024 to increase electric pickup-truck production and build a new EV battery cell plant.