Responsabilité sociale des entreprises

Le 15 janvier 2025, la jurisprudence américaine a rendu un arrêt qui aborde le contenu des devoirs fiduciaires des gestionnaires de fonds.

Dans l’affaire Spence v. American Airlines, Inc. 2025 WL 225127 (N.D. Tex. 2025), le plaignant a intenté une action collective contre American Airlines et son comité des avantages sociaux des employés (« EBC ») en invoquant des manquements aux obligations fiduciaires de loyauté et de prudence résultant des pratiques d’investissement des fiduciaires du plan.

Extrait tiré du site du cabinet Miller Canfield (ici) :

Defendants Breached the Fiduciary Duty of Loyalty

The district court in American Airlines concluded that the plan fiduciaries breached their duty of loyalty by failing to act solely in the retirement plan’s best financial interest when the plan fiduciaries allowed their corporate interests to influence management and investment of plan assets. The court found it apparent that the plan fiduciaries failed to question BlackRock’s ESG activities, either because the plan sponsor’s corporate objectives were aligned with BlackRock’s ESG objectives or because the plan fiduciaries were afraid to question a large shareholder (or both).

The court took note of the following factors that showed the various corporate ties to BlackRock that were inappropriately leveraged to influence management of the plan:

• BlackRock was one of American Airline’s largest shareholders.
• BlackRock managed billions of dollars in plan assets at a time that it owned 5% of American Airline’s stock.
• BlackRock financed roughly $400 million of American Airline’s corporate debt when American Airlines was experiencing financial difficulty.

Defendants Did Not Breach the Fiduciary Duty of Prudence

Despite finding that the plan fiduciaries breached the duty of loyalty, the court found that their investment monitoring practices were consistent with prevailing industry practices and that the plan fiduciaries acted in a manner similar to other fiduciaries in the industry. Accordingly, the court did not find that the plan fiduciaries breached the duty of prudence when using BlackRock as an investment manager.

À la prochaine…

Très intéressant papier de recherche de l’ECGI de Susan Watson et Lynn Buckley intitutlé « Directors’ Positive Duty to Act in the Interests of the Entity: Shareholders’ Interests Bounded by Corporate Purpose ». La maximisation actionnariale a du plomb dans l’aile !

Résumé :

Directors’ duty to act in good faith and to act in the best interests of the company relates to the interests of shareholders held in the company as a separate legal entity. The obligation to act in the best interests of shareholders is potentially bounded by corporate purpose as the office requires directors to act in accordance with the constitution and Companies Act.  The origin of the duty is traced to the emergence of permanent capital in the business corporation and the resulting new oaths sworn by directors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Charitable Corporation v Sutton considered in that historical context.

The analysis illustrates that the duty is not owed to shareholders collectively at any time, but rather to the company as a separate entity from its shareholders. The interests of shareholders are held in the company as its capital base. The duty is considered in relation to the even longer-standing obligation that officers of corporations act faithfully to ensure compliance with the corporation’s charter.

The article concludes that the re-inclusion of purpose provisions in company constitutions combined with recognition that the modern company is an entity rather than contractual could significantly influence the application of the good faith and best interests duty.

À la prochaine…

Podcast bien intéressant sur Spotify consacré à une thématique centrale du blogue : « How do boards manage the twin demands of their duties to shareholders and responsabilities towards the environment ».

• Pour accéder au Podcast : cliquez ici

Résumé :

In this episode of Leadership Playbook, David Jackson, former Company Secretary of BP, joins Tom Gosling, Executive Fellow at the London Business School for a lively discussion on the topic. Using the example of oil and gas companies, David and Tom explore the role of the board versus the CEO when it comes to strategy development. They also consider board responsibilities around maximizing shareholder value balanced against environmental questions. Finally, they look at the role of shareholder preferences, board duties, and ethics, when it comes to ESG.

À la prochaine…

Les professeurs Dorothy S. Lund et Elizabeth Pollman publient un article « The Corporate Governance Machine » (ECGI Law Series 564/2021) qui montre que la RSE implique de faire avancer l’intérêt des actionnaires pour espérer un vrai changement des entreprises. Intéressant…

Résumé

The conventional view of corporate governance is that it is a neutral set of processes and practices that govern how a company is managed.

We demonstrate that this view is profoundly mistaken: in the United States, corporate governance has become a “system” composed of an array of institutional players, with a powerful shareholderist orientation. Our original account of this “corporate governance machine” generates insights about the past, present, and future of corporate governance. As for the past, we show how the concept of corporate governance developed alongside the shareholder primacy movement. This relationship is reflected in the common refrain of “good governance” that pervades contemporary discourse and the maturation of corporate governance as an industry oriented toward serving shareholders and their interests.

As for the present, our analysis explains why the corporate social responsibility movement transformed into shareholder value-oriented ESG, stakeholder capitalism became relegated to a new separate form of entity known as the benefit corporation, and public company boards of directors became homogenized across industries. As for the future, our analysis suggests that absent a major paradigm shift, advocacy pushing corporations to consider the interests of employees, communities, and the environment will likely fail if such effort is not framed as advancing shareholder interests.

À la prochaine…

La professeur australienne Jennifer Hill (toujours intéressante à lire, je vous la conseille vivement !) vient de publier ce nouvel article « Corporations, Directors’ Duties and the Public/Private Divide » dans l’ECGI Law Series 539/2020 (25 septembre 2020). Par rapport à nos thématiques du site, cette étude est un incontournable !

Extrait :

Business history and theory reflect a tension between public and private conceptions of the corporation. This tension and conceptual ambiguity lay close to the surface of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, in which Berle and Means portrayed the modern public corporation as straddling the public/private divide. It is also embodied in the famous Berle-Dodd debate, which provides the basis for contemporary clashes between “different visions of corporatism,” such as the conflict between shareholder primacy and stakeholder-centered versions of the corporation.

This chapter examines a number of recent developments suggesting that the pendulum, which swung so clearly in favour of a private conception of the corporation from the 1980s onwards, is in the process of changing direction.

The chapter provides two central insights. The first is that there is not one problem, but multiple problems in corporate law, and that different problems may come to the forefront at different times. Although financial performance is a legitimate concern in corporate law, it is also important to recognize, and address, the danger that corporate conduct may result in negative externalities and harm to society. The chapter argues that it is therefore, a mistake to view the two sides of the Berle-Dodd debate as binary and irreconcilable. The second insight is that corporate governance techniques (such as performance-based pay), which are designed to ameliorate one problem in corporate law, such as corporate performance, can at the same time exacerbate other problems involving the social impact of corporations.

As the chapter shows, a number of recent developments in corporate law have highlighted the negative externalities and social harm that corporate actions can cause. These developments suggest the emergence of a more cohesive vision of the corporation that encompasses both private and public aspects. The developments also potentially affect the role and duties of company directors, who are no longer seen merely as monitors of corporate performance, but also as monitors of corporate integrity and the risk of social harm.

À la prochaine…