Nouvelles diverses | Page 25

En ce début d’avril 2020, le Forum Économique Mondial vient de publier une déclaration sur les principes parties prenantes qu’il entend promouvoir durant la crise du COVID-19 : « Stakeholder Principles in the COVID Era ».

Extrait :

To this end, we endorse the following Stakeholder Principles in the COVID Era:

− To employees, our principle is to keep you safe: We will continue do everything we can to protect your workplace, and to help you to adapt to the new working conditions

− To our ecosystem of suppliers and customers, our principle is to secure our shared business continuity: We will continue to work to keep supply chains open and integrate you into our business response

− To our end consumers, our principle is to maintain fair prices and commercial terms for essential supplies

− To governments and society, our principle is to offer our full support: We stand ready and will continue to complement public action with our resources, capabilities and know-how

− To our shareholders, our principle remains the long-term viability of the company and its potential to create sustained value

Finally, we also maintain the principle that we must continue our sustainability efforts unabated, to bring our world closer to achieving shared goals, including the Paris climate agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda. We will continue to focus on those long-term goals.

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Très intéressant article du Financial Times au titre très clair : « Investors and politicians demand coronavirus pay cuts » (4 avril 2020). L’Angleterre démontre un changement de perspective dans le domaine de la rémunération de la haute direction… Un exemple à suivre ?

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L’influent ICGN a pris récemment position sur les conséquences du COVID-19 pour la gouvernance d’entreprise, sachant que ce réseau international fait de cette pandémie un risque systémique (rien de moins !). Vous pourrez lire les préconisation de l’ICGN dans le document suivant : ICGN Viewpoint, « Coronavirus as a new systemic risk: implications for corporate governance and investor stewardship », 12 mars 2020.

Extrait concernant les investisseurs

Despite these negative economic events investors should avoid focusing on the crisis in terms of its short-term shareholder value implications. It is here where a long-term perspective, and perhaps a grounding ethics and values more generally, should also guide investor responses. In the language of modern finance, this may be less an opportunity for investors seeking alpha generation in individual companies than it is a question of addressing ‘beta’ issues—the volatility/stability of the markets and financial system as a whole. This may be fiendishly complicated, but an important guiding principle for investors relates to their fundamental fiduciary duty of care to their beneficiaries. This confirms the importance of taking a long-term perspective, since most ICGN Members, and large institutional investors more generally, are managing assets for pension plans or retirement saving plans, where the investment horizon is intrinsically long-term, or in theory infinite.

It is beyond the scope of this Viewpoint to suggest specific investment or trading strategies for investors in addressing the impacts of COVID-19. There is no generic solution. These will differ depending on individual investor mandates and beneficiary requirements. But from the perspective of investor stewardship and fiduciary duty — and consistent with ICGN’s Global Stewardship Principles and Policy Priorities3 — it is fair to suggest that in reacting to this crisis investors should generally seek to maintain an approach that promotes long-term investment horizons and sustainable value creation for individual companies and markets.

As a practical matter this requires investors to appreciate that companies will be facing difficult questions in response to the impacts of COVID-19. The first priority for managers and boards will be to ensure the company’s own financial sustainability. Investors must also understand that capital allocation questions may surface where compromise is required. Companies may have to choose between cutting dividend payments, cutting capital spending or cutting costs, possibly leading to redundancies. Investors should demonstrate support for companies as they navigate potentially acute financial threats and market pressures. Investors should also avoid encouraging companies to undertake undue risks that might provide a short-term investor benefit but could also jeopardise a company’s financial stability or the sustainability of its business model. This reflects not only some level of enlightened self-interest, but also the moral imperative to contribute positively to the broader threats to public health and social stability.

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« Les entreprises doivent-elles continuer à verser des dividendes à leurs actionnaires? »… Que la question est belle et impertinente ! C’est ce débat que je vous propose d’écouter ici : https://www.rts.ch/play/radio/forum/audio/les-entreprises-doivent-elles-continuer-a-verser-des-dividendes-a-leurs-actionnaires?id=11184113

Débat entre Paul Dembinski, directeur de l’Observatoire de la finance, et Jérôme Schupp, analyste financier chez Prime Partners.

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Telles sont les propositions des professeurs Konstantinos Sergakis et Andreas Kokkinis dans leur article intitulé « Employee Advisory Panels: A New Paradigm for Shareholder-based Governance? » (25 mars 2020). À découvrir…

Extrait :

Employee participation in corporate governance refers to a range of institutions, voluntary or legally mandated, that engage employees in corporate decision-making, such as works councils with co-decision powers on labour matters, advisory panels, information and consultation committees, employee share ownership schemes and board representation. Corporate contractarian literature dismisses employee participation as inefficient on the grounds that, if it were efficient, it would be voluntarily adopted widely. In our paper, we argue that the scarcity of employee participation in the UK can be attributed to shareholder short-termism and behavioural biases and, therefore, that the question of its efficiency remains open for companies that want to explore this possibility. We thus propose a flexible approach that companies can follow to implement employee participation. Our approach takes into account the broader UK institutional framework by creating adaptable and long-term solutions for both listed and large private companies. Nevertheless, it can be adopted in any other national context where employee board representation has not been mandated by company law provisions.

We argue that the most pragmatic way to encourage efficient employee participation is through the introduction of formal and permanent employee advisory panels and, in the longer term, the proliferation of employee share ownership schemes coupled with special rights to appoint a number of directors in tandem with the size of employee share ownership. Our approach relies on an incremental participation model, whereby employees should first be given a dialogue channel through advisory panels to gain adequate experience before appointing board members. 

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