We highly recommend this excellent essay from exemplary shareholder activist and corporate governance expert James McRitchie. He explains that while fiduciary directors may be focused on externalizing costs to capture as much value as possible within the company’s profits, for fiduciary investors who have diversified portfolios voting proxies should be based on what is best…
Category: fiduciary
Highlights of the new DOL/EBSA Rule on ESG
Emphasis added. Full text of the rule.
Bratton: Self-Dealing Transactions Are Not That Bad
The Fall 2021 issue of the American Bar Association’s scholarly journal, The Business Lawyer features an article by Professor William W. Bratton arguing that the “evolutionary erosion” theory that fiduciary obligation of corporate board members has been weakened over time does not apply to management self-dealing. He says that related party transactions involving the executives…
DOL’s New Proposed Rule on Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights
DOL/EBSA has a new proposed rule on ESG and proxy votes. Stay tuned for more information and our formal comment. NOTE: Comments due by December 13, 2021 and we will be up against an avalanche of opposition. The Department of Labor (Department) in this document proposes amendments to the Investment Duties regulation under Title I…
Comment Letter to DOL/EBSA on Proxy Voting from Jon Lukomnik, Keith Johnson, and other Experts
VEA Chair Robert A.G. Monks and Vice Chair Nell Minow signed this letter (in addition to their own letter) along with 14 other experts. The full letter is below. An excerpt [footnotes omitted]. This letter is written in opposition to the above proposed rule by 16 professionals with more than 400 years of combined experience…
CII Letter to DOL/EBSA on the Proxy Voting Proposal
The Council of Institutional Investors has filed a comment objecting to the proposed rule form DOL/EBSA on proxy voting by ERISA fiduciaries. The full comment is below. An excerpt [footnotes omitted]: DOL has not provided a persuasive rationale for the Proposed Rule. In fact, the Proposed Rule is premised on fundamentally flawed assumptions about shareholder…
VEA Comment to DOL/EBSA on Proxy Voting
October 2, 2020 Jeanne Klinefelter Wilson Acting Assistant Secretary Employee Benefits Security Administration United States Department of Labor 200 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20210 RE: RIN 1210-AB91 Dear Acting Assistant Secretary Wilson, In the long, dismaying history of regulatory capture, when agencies set up to provide oversight instead issue rules entrenching and subsidizing corporate insiders,…
Even the Threat of a Tougher Rule on Financial Advice Has Helped Investors – The New York Times
A battle over exactly how investors should be treated when they get financial advice has been underway for years. The Obama administration pushed for stricter investor protections, while the Trump administration has been putting looser rules into effect. But here’s the thing: The tougher Obama rules, which were never fully put into effect, have already…
DOL proposes rule to narrow scope of ERISA fiduciaries’ proxy voting
DOL/EBSA has followed up its outrageously unsupportable proposed rule on ESG investing (more than 95 percent of the more than 7000 comments strongly opposed) with an even more outrageously unsupportable proposed rule rolling back more than 30 years of settled law that all aspects of share ownership — the right to trade, to sue, and…
Jon Lukomnik Comment Letter to DOL/EBSA on ESG Rulemaking
Jon Lukomnik’s letter to DOL/EBSA about the proposed rule on ESG investing has been co-signed by distinguished academics and investment professionals, along with VEA’s Chair, Vice Chair, and President. Attention: Financial Factors in Selecting Plan Investment Proposed Regulation. To Whom It May Concern: We are writing in opposition to proposed rule RIN 1210-AB95. We believe…
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