Normes d’encadrement | Page 141

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, intéressant article paru dans The Globe and Mail du 10 juin 2015 : « OSC rebukes firms for lack of action on gender-diversity rules ». Faut-il y voir là les limite des normes souple sur le modèle du comply or explain ? Le Canada ne devait-il pas aller plus loin comme la France ou les pays nordiques en imposant des quotas ?

Many companies have shown bare “technical compliance” with new gender-diversity reporting rules introduced this year and it is “simply not good enough,” Ontario Securities Commission chair Howard Wetston says. Mr. Wetston said on Wednesday that the OSC has begun reviewing proxy circulars filed this year to see how companies are responding to the rules requiring them to disclose details about their policies to bolster women in senior roles, or else explain why they do not have policies in place. While some companies have provided excellent disclosure and have a lot of women on their boards of directors, he said, others have been disappointing.

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Ivan Tchotourian

Décidément l’OCDE nous livre de très intéressantes contributions. En voici une de plus en avril 2015 avec le « Corporate Governance Factbook ». Mine d’informations en termes de statistiques, de tableaux, de pratiques et de comparaison des droits, je vous recommande la lecture de ce document !

Voici la table des matières :

1. Introduction
2. The Corporate Landscape
   – The ownership structure of listed companies
3. The Corporate Governance Framework
   – The regulatory framework for corporate governance
   – Cross-border application of corporate governance requirements
   – The main public regulators of corporate governance
   – Stock exchanges
4. The Rights of Shareholders and Key Ownership Functions
   – Notification of general meetings and information provided to shareholders
   – Shareholder rights to request a meeting and to place items on the agenda
   – Shareholder voting
   – Related party transactions
   – Takeover bid rules
   – The roles and responsibilities of institutional investors
5. The Corporate Board of Directors
   – Basic board structure and independence
   – Board-level committees
   – Board nomination and election
   – Board and key executive remuneration

The OECD Corporate Governance Factbook provides an easily accessible and up-to-date, factual underpinning for understanding countries’ institutional, legal and regulatory frameworks, and to support their implementation of good corporate governance practices. It serves as a resource for governments who want to compare their own framework with that of other countries or seek information about practices in specific jurisdictions. The Factbook compiles information gathered from OECD and non-OECD country delegates to the OECD Corporate Governance Committee as part of a series of thematic reviews issued by the OECD. The thematic reviews cover major corporate governance challenges that came into focus following the 2008 crisis: board practices (including remuneration); institutional investors; related party transactions; board member nomination and election; supervision and enforcement; and risk management.

Pour accéder à ce rapport, cliquez ici.

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Ivan Tchotourian

Quand on vous le dit que l’ISR sert de plus en plus de norme d’encadrement pour une gouvernance d’entreprise responsable ! C’est ce que révèle entre les lignes ce très intéressant article du quotidien The Globe and Mail du 14 août 2015 intitulé : « Good corporate citizen, better investment » (ici). Une phrase illustre le contenu de l’article : « Financial impact of climate change and other non-traditional risks is driving broader interest in responsible investment ».

Diversifying with stocks and bonds or guaranteed investment certificates is what protects you against the kind of stock market volatility we saw this week, but there’s another aspect to risk. It relates to a company’s behaviour in the community, the boardroom, the environment and in dealings with employees. Concentrating on companies that score well in these areas is called responsible investing (RI) and it’s a quietly hot trend in the investment business. “It’s the fastest growing area of my business,” said Patti Dolan, an adviser who specializes in RI investing with Raymond James in Calgary. “I don’t actually prospect [for clients] – people call me.”

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Ivan Tchotourian

Dans une entrevue sur la BBC (ici), Le chef économiste de la Banque d’Angleterre (Andy Haldane) a livré une belle critique du court-termisme invoquant le fait que les sociétés devraient investir davantage dans le futur plutôt que verser des dividendes en argent aux actionnaires ou de racheter leurs actions. Très intéressant à lire !

Morceaux choisis :

Last Friday on Newsnight the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane sought to kick-start a debate on how companies run themselves. He told me that companies risk « eating themselves » as shareholders and management were gripped by a form of short-termism. Instead of investing in their futures firms are choosing to pay out too much of their cash to shareholders in the form of dividends or by buying back their own shares. (…)

It’s perfectly possible that shareholders might be too powerful and too disinterested. The issue could be that management is too focussed on short-term shareholder returns and so prioritises returning cash to them and increasing the share price in the short term, even if that isn’t in the company’s long-term interest. (…)

To understand how this situation might have arisen over the last few decades, one only needs to look at two trends. As Haldane argued last week – shareholding periods have fallen. There are fewer and fewer investors willing to take a long-term view. And secondly the trend has been to increasingly tie top management payment to share price performance. In other words, whatever the long-term benefits of investment in machinery, research or training five or six years down the line, we may have a system in which the rational thing to do is to focus on the next six months, not the next six years. The possible fixes to this situation are many and varied – from embracing a Germanic system of stakeholder capitalism (in which the workforce as well as the owners have a role in decision making), to looking again at executive compensation or maybe to an intermediate situation – perhaps ordering directors to act in the interest of a theoretical « perpetual shareholder », rather than existing (often short-term) investors. None of those options are a quick fix, all involve reform of the Companies Act, which is a mammoth bit of legislation. (…)

This is a big agenda and a big debate. On one level it could even be described as an attempt to save capitalism from capitalists, an argument that the ultimate owners of capital have stopped working in their own long-term interest. But, perhaps in those terms, it sounds too radical. On a more micro level this is a debate about economic incentives. It may simply be that the incentive structure in Anglo-Saxon capitalism has become skewed towards rewarding short-term behaviour.

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Ivan Tchotourian

Les investisseurs institutionnels viennent de créer un Forum sur la gouvernance d’entreprise en Nouvelle-Zélande : ici.

D’importantes lignes directrices en matière de gouvernance sont fournies sur le site : ici. Vous pouvez même accéder ici au guide complet.

Attention tout de même, ce guide ressemble (bien entendu) au « Financial Market Authority’s Corporate Governance – Principles and Guidelines: A handbook for directors, executives and advisers » de l’autorité des marchés financiers.

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Ivan Tchotourian