Quotes – The Business Case for Sustainability & CSR Reporting: Selected Quotes from the Business Community July 2010. Tim Smith of Walden Asset Management, offered up a helpful resource providing a selected set of quotes from CEO’s and company CSR reports on the business case for Sustainability and CSR reporting highlighting how they contribute to shareowner value. Business leaders explain in their own words why their companies are stepping up on Sustainability issues and how they contribute to the business and its bottom line. The research was done by Carly Greenberg, a Summer Associate at Walden and a student at Brandeis University. You can download it from the Socially Responsible Business/Investments section of our Links page.
Sullivan & Worcester recently announced a free resource for law and corporate librarians, researchers and reporters. The Financial Crisis Timeline is a full chronological directory of the Federal Government’s actions relating to the financial crisis since March 2008. Links take the user to government press releases or government web pages. You can also find on our Links page in the History section, for future reference. (Hat tip to Dan Boxer, University of Maine School of Law)
Keith Bishop, a partner in Allen Matkins, recently started a blog devoted to California corporate and securities law issues. For future reference, you can find it on our Links page in the Law section. As I recall, Bishop first came to my attention after 1991, when the Rules Committee of the California Senate appointed him the Senate Commission on Corporate Governance Shareholder Rights and Securities Transactions.
For companies seeking to aviod proxy access, J.W Verret (Truth on the Market) posted the second of two strategies. Proxy Access Defense #1 involved adopting poison pills.
In Selectica, summarized by Pileggi here, the Court held valid a poison pill with a 4.99% trigger. At first glance this seems to be a great twist for those of us who remain skeptical of the federal government’s intrusion into this foundational issue of state law. Boards could just lower the pill trigger to 4.99%. Then even to the extent shareholders could afford to obtain a 5% interest in a company, those who did not already own a 5% interest at the time of the pill’s adoption would not be able to obtain an interest sufficient to nominate onto the corporate proxy.
Even after enactment of Dodd-Frank, Verret speculates this tactic might work at most companies, since the threshold being considered by the SEC for small companies is 5%. The latest strategy offered up by Verret in Proxy Access Defense #2 is even more insidious:
The Delaware General Corporation Law gives the board and the shareholders the co-extensive authority to adopt bylaws setting the qualification requirements necessary to become a director. There is very little case law interpreting this provision, other than the general rule from Schnell v. Chris-Craft that powers granted to the corporation may not be used in an inequitable manner. Qualification requirements based on experience, education, and other background-like variables would likely survive scrutiny, particularly where they are adopted well in advance of a threatened proxy fight.
The key element in such a bylaw would be that the Board would serve as the ultimate interpreter of the provisions. For example, a qualification provision could require directors to have 20 years of experience at a comparable company in the same line of business. The Board, then, would determine whether that requirement has been met, and only after the proxy contest has actually happened. Under the holding in Bebchuk v. CA, a shareholder challenge to such a facially neutral bylaw would likely not even be justiciable until a shareholder nominee actually won the contest. And yet, the prospect that the Board will invalidate the director may discourage nominees in the first instance.
I wonder if Professor Verret also offers advice on how to circumvent tax codes, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, or the Americans With Disabilities Act. Harvard must be pleased to have such a distinguished scholar. Hopefully, most companies will seek to work with their shareowners but I suppose there will always be companies like Apache that may find Verret’s strategies appealing. No, I’m not adding these posts to our Links page. Hopefully, they will fall under the category of fantasy.
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