VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow writes on Medium: In May, I wrote about shareholder initiatives at gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger & Company to improve the board of directors and get better information about safety measures and mitigation of harm associated with company products, including efforts to improve gun safety and assessment of the corporate reputational…
Category: activism
Main Street Investors: Now They’re Just Desperate (Are There Too Few IPOs?)
The Main Street Investors Coalition can no longer argue that they have any connection to Main Street or investors as we have repeatedly made clear in articles, news stories, blog posts, and responses to their tweets, that they are a fake dark money front group funded by corporations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, and…
KraftHeinz Becomes Fourth Big Company to Agree to As You Sow’s Request for Action and Timeline on Recyclable Packaging — As You Sow
Following engagement with As You Sow, food and beverage giant KraftHeinz, the third largest U.S. food and beverage company, has committed to make 100% of its packaging recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025….KraftHeinz is the fourth largest consumer goods company to make a significant commitment to recycling packaging following engagement with As You Sow. In…
Shareholders Bring Gun Safety Issues to the Boardroom
The post-Parkland move to bring the United States to the sensible gun safety rules adopted by other countries has now moved from protests and politics to where the money is, the corporate executives and directors who run the companies that manufacture and sell guns and determine the millions of dollars the NRA spends on political…
Activist/Impact Investing: Zevin Asset Management
Zevin Asset Management issued a new report about its activist initiatives. An excerpt (emphasis added): When Congress failed to respond to the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, the conversation shifted to whether financial companies would act to address risks. In March, Zevin Asset Management joined with other investors to denounce gun violence and define the…
ICCR Proxy Proposal Voting Guide 2018
ICCR’s proxy voting guide is an essential resource, with information on all of its members’ shareholder resolutions for the 2018 proxy season. They include 61 resolutions on climate change, 57 on inclusiveness/diversity, 45 on lobbying and political contribution disclosure, 26 on human rights/trafficking, 25 on corporate governance, 23 on environment/sustainability, 12 on health, 8 on…
Do “Golden Leashes” Conflict with Directors’ Fiduciary Duty?
Some activist shareholders want to make side payments to the directors they put on boards. Is that good or bad for the other shareholders? Gregory H. Shill writes: Traditionally, activist hedge funds identify a company ripe for improvement, acquire a toehold position in the company’s stock, and then launch a campaign to convince shareholders to…
At BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, ‘Engagement’ Has Different Meanings – WSJ
Sarah Krause writes in the WSJ about large institutional investors’ differing views of “engagement,” noting that they also differ on their analysis of particular engagement/activism opportunities. The biggest passive money managers all like to use some version of the word “engage” when describing how they hold their portfolio companies accountable behind the scenes. They differ on…
Do Activists Turn Bad Bidders into Good Acquirers?
A new paper documents the beneficial impact of activist investors in optimizing corporate transactions. In our new working paper, Do Activists Turn Bad Bidders into Good Acquirers?, available on SSRN, we uncover a new role of activists in the market for corporate control. We present evidence that activists curb incentives to engage in empire building…
The Legal Validity of Oral Agreements with Activist Investors
This one reads like a law school case study. In the 21st century, it is highly unusual that parties, especially adverse parties, would enter into an agreement without putting it into writing. It is even more unlikely that a dispute over an oral agreement would go all the way to trial. And yet that is…
