Beyond PowerPoint — making meetings meaningful, and integrating the board with the company’s operations and executives at Netflix: At most companies, directors have a less complete understanding of the company than executives because of their limited exposure to day-to-day activities. The format of the information they receive does little to overcome this information deficit. The…
CEOs should disclose their real wages. The real pay gap is [even more] maddening.
This year’s first pay ratio disclosures are not entirely accurate, according to Ralph Nader and Steven Clifford in USA Today, because they omit the biggest category of CEO pay, stock and option grants. Apity reported that CEO Kevin P. Clark’s total compensation was $13,800,347. He also received $17,699,452 from exercising stock option, an amount not…
McKesson Board Can’t Dodge Opioid Shipment `Red Flags’ Suit – Bloomberg
Some McKesson Corp. directors must face an investor lawsuit accusing them of failing to honor promises to ensure internal systems for spotting suspicious opioid shipments functioned properly. Two shareholders of the San Francisco-based company can press claims the distributor’s board was asleep at the switch when it came to overseeing such shipments after a 2008…
Carillion bosses drove construction firm off a cliff, say MPs – BBC News
The UK firm Carillon has collapsed, declaring bankruptcy as its share price is just above zero. The “integrated support services business” held about 450 governmental contracts, from school meals to maintenance, construction, and traffic control. Last year, it issued three profit warnings in five months and wrote off more than £1 billion. In a damning…
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…
More Trouble for Wells Fargo: Bank Improperly Kept a Pension Fund’s Fee Rebates – WSJ
Wells Fargo cannot seem to get it right. This is especially disturbing considering its many previous violations and promises that all its problems have been solved. And it is even more disturbing that in this case the relationship was not just with a customer, but a pension fund for whom it was acting in a…
David Webber on Employee-Funded Capitalism: “Labor’s Last Best Weapon”
In the subtitle of his highly recommended new book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder, David Webber calls employee pension funds “Labor’s Last Best Weapon.” He says that working-class employees could be a powerful force for sustainable economic growth through their pension funds. In an interview, Webber talked about the opportunities and challenges in making the…
Amazon adopts ‘Rooney Rule’ proposal for diversity in reversal – Recode
Amazon said on Monday that it would adopt a policy whereby women and people of color are included in the pool of candidates for all board openings, essentially agreeing to a hotly debated shareholder proposal it had initially opposed. “The Amazon Board of Directors has adopted a policy that the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee…
FCA fines Barclays boss £640k over whistleblower failings – Citywire
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Relegation Authority (PRA) have fined the chief executive of Barclays £642,430 over his handling of a whistle blower.In a joint statement the two regulators announced the Barclays chief James Staley will be fined for his failure to ‘act with due skill, care and diligence in the way he acted…
Corporate Governance Principles – Investor Stewardship Group
CORPORATE GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK FOR U.S. LISTED COMPANIES Principle 1: Boards are accountable to shareholders. Principle 2: Shareholders should be entitled to voting rights in proportion to their economic interest. Principle 3: Boards should be responsive to shareholders and be proactive in order to understand their perspectives. Principle 4: Boards should have a strong, independent leadership…
AT&T, foreign corporations risk legal action for payments to Michael Cohen firm – MarketWatch
The payments made to the personal attorney of President Donald Trump raise questions as to whether these companies violated anti-bribery rules, experts in federal bribery laws say.The lawyer for the adult film star suing the president revealed that three companies, AT&T, Switzerland’s Novartis and Korea Aerospace Industries, made payments to Michael Cohen. Each company has…
Jes Staley, Thomas Middelhoff, and what Europe gets right about CEO accountability.
The FT today published a fascinating interview with Thomas Middelhoff, the former CEO of Bertelsmann, the German media giant. Middelhoff became a star during the dot-com boom—his $50 million investment in AOL became a $7 billion exit five years later—and then his star fell. Middelhoff ended up sentenced to three years in prison after being found…
