With the news today that Theresa May will become prime minister this Wednesday, we note with interest reports that she intends to make large companies more accountable by having consumers and employee representatives on boards. This resurrects an idea put to consultation by BIS during Vince Cable’s watch in the run-up to the introduction of … Continue Reading
Glass Lewis recently released updates to its policies that govern recommendations to shareholders on a number of corporate governance matters. As relates specifically to compensation, such updates include: In assessing pay-for-performance, compensation plans that otherwise receive an unsatisfactory rating from Glass Lewis’ qualitative evaluation model may nevertheless receive a recommendation of approval from Glass Lewis … Continue Reading
Earlier this month, Squire Sanders hosted a roundtable discussion, “The Activist Shareholder,” during its 2014 Roundtable for General Counsel in the Chemical and Performance Materials Industries, a two-day executive event held in Washington, DC. The panel addressed the significant increase in shareholder activism in recent years, and among other topics, it addressed the need for … Continue Reading
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The European Commission has announced proposals to overhaul shareholder powers on executive pay, with several provisions seeming to imitate the new regulations that apply to UK incorporated companies that are listed on the Stock Exchange. Did the Commission really mean to flatter the UK government? The … Continue Reading
The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has recently published its paper “Collective Engagement Investor Exchange”, giving details of how its Investor Exchange mechanism, one of the means of improving shareholder engagement suggested in its July 2013 report on Corporate Governance and Shareholder Engagement, will work in practice. Invitations to meetings set up between the ABI … Continue Reading
On October 31, 2013, shareholders of Oracle Corp. voted “no” to CEO and founder Larry Ellison’s pay package worth $78.4 million (which is actually down 18 percent from the $96.2 million package he received a year earlier for which he also received a “no” vote by Oracle shareholders) (see Oracle Form 8-K filing). Approximately 56.3 percent of … Continue Reading
Executive compensation in the US is the highest in the world in both absolute terms and relative to median salary in the US (who can forget the widely publicized news report that J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson received a compensation package worth 1,795 times the average salary of a US department store worker?). Other countries, … Continue Reading
