Normes d’encadrement | Page 97

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, M. Patrick D’humieres publie une tribune sur la place de l’État dans la construction de la responsabilité sociétale : « L’Etat ne doit pas se mêler de la RSE » (Les Échos.fr, 19 août 2016). Pour lui, le message est clair : « Rien ne justifie donc a priori que la puissance publique intervienne sur des opérations qui ne relèvent pas de sa compétence. Cela revient à perpétuer un interventionnisme archaïque qui, sous couvert de RSE, cherche à étendre le champ de la responsabilité juridique de l’entreprise a priori ».

Paradoxe de la gouvernance publique : alors que l’Etat croule sous les réformes à faire pour retrouver une efficacité attendue dans sa gestion, il demande aux acteurs civils ce qu’il doit faire pour orienter la responsabilité sociétale des entreprises (RSE), domaine réservé à l’initiative volontaire du secteur économique s’il en est ! La question surprend d’autant plus que la RSE consiste à prendre en charge des intérêts collectifs, au-delà de l’obligation légale, et quand on sait aussi que les entreprises françaises font partie des plus engagées, au dire des meilleurs classements internationaux (DJSI) et des agences de notation spécialisées (Oekom Research), tant en termes de transparence, qu’en termes d’initiatives fortes, allant de l’écoconception des offres aux accords-cadres internationaux et en passant par le suivi des sous-traitants et la décarbonation des modèles.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

The University of St. Michael’s College a rejoint le rséseau SHARE il y a peu : « Institutional investors push for environmental, social changes in companies through SHARE » (Benefits Canada, 12 août 2016). Cet article est l’occasion de revenir sur quelques statistiques et tendances que je vous livre ci-dessous :

More than 30 institutional investors across Canada, with a combined $14 billion in assets under management, participate in SHARE, including the United Church of Canada’s pension plan. (…) Each year, SHARE speaks with 50 to 100 companies — often in the mining, oil and gas, and financial services industries — about health and safety, climate change, water use and Aboriginal relations issues.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Un groupe de travail du Financial Reporting Council (FRC) a publié fin avril 2016 un bilan de la 1e phase de son travail : « Phase 1 Report of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) ». Qu’en retenir ?

Objectifs

We support the objectives of the TCFD and welcome that it is focussing on financial risks and in particular those that could have a potential impact on future cash flows. We believe that this is important in identifying the boundary of information that would be relevant to investors’ decision-making. As with any project with multiple objectives there will be instances where a trade-off is necessary. Consistent principles are important, but absolute uniformity in disclosures detracts from careful consideration and communication of information that is relevant for its users. Whilst climate related risks will be important to many companies any recommendations must be proportionate and balanced, to avoid excessive focus on one set of risks to the detriment of disclosures of the other principal risks and uncertainties a company faces. Boards must retain responsibility for determining what disclosures, if any, on climate related risks are relevant and material. This requires an understanding of the potential impacts of climate change and legislative responses, and the application of judgement. Identification of factors to be considered by management when making such an assessment will be helpful.

Portée

The recommendation should provide preparers and their boards an understanding of the factors to consider when assessing, mitigating and, where necessary, reporting the climate change risks they might face. Factors to consider might include the sensitivity of its business model to climate related legislation (for example, the existence of low carbon substitute products or processes); the energy use and carbon emissions of the company, its products and suppliers; the company’s investment planning periods; and the geographical location of operations and its distribution channels. High risk sectors could then be used to illuminate those factors.

Utilisateurs

We note from the Phase 1 Report that the intended users for the information goes beyond those making direct investments in companies to those further back in the capital supply chain. We welcome this to ensure more informed capital allocation decisions. However the disclosure recommendations will need to take into consideration the needs of the intended audience and be dependent on the type of preparer as different considerations will apply for climate related risks arising from companies reporting on their own operational activities in their annual report and those investing in a portfolio of assets or advising on investment activities. We also encourage the TCFD to consider the placement of information outside the annual report when recommending disclosures that might go beyond the needs of the annual report’s intended audience. We encourage reporting of more detailed voluntary information for investors or other users outside the annual report so that it does not detract from the key messages.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Excellent texte auquel je viens d’accéder rédigé par Yvon Allaire et François Dauphin daté du 11 août 2016 et intitulé : “Making Say-on-Pay Vote Binding: a Good Idea?” (IGOPP).

Petit extrait :

The challenge of reading and understanding the particulars of executive compensation has become far more daunting. Indeed, for the 50 largest (by market cap) companies on the TSX in 2015 that were also listed back in 2000, the median number of pages to describe their compensation went from 6 in 2000 to 34 pages in 2015, ranging all the way up to 66 pages. Investors with holdings in dozens or hundreds of stocks face a formidable task. The simplest way out is either to vote per the stock’s performance or, more likely, rely on the recommendation of proxy advisory firms (which also base their “advice” on relative stock market performance. (…)

Boards of directors, compensation committees and their consultants have come to realize that it is wiser and safer to toe the line and put forth pay packages that will pass muster with proxy advisory firms. The result has been a remarkable standardization of compensation, a sort of “copy and paste” across publicly listed companies. Thus, most CEO pay packages are linked to the same metrics, whether they operate in manufacturing, retailing, banking, mining, energy, pharmaceuticals or services. For the companies on the S&P/TSX 60 index, the so-called long term compensation for their CEO in 2015 was based on total shareholder return (TSR) or the earnings per share growth (EPS) in 85% of cases. The proxy advisory firm ISS has been promoting these measures as the best way to connect compensation to performance. (…)

At a more fundamental level, the setting of pay policies should be the preserve of the board, as Canadian corporate law clearly states. When egregious pay packages are given to executives, a say-on-pay vote, compulsory or not, binding or not, will always be much less effective than a majority of votes against the election of members of the compensation committee. But that calls upon large investment funds to show fortitude and cohesiveness in the few instances of unwarranted compensation which occur every year.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, information intéressante qui divulgue Le Devoir : « Londres veut punir les conseillers qui facilitent l’évasion fiscale » (18 août 2016).

Le gouvernement britannique entend durcir la répression contre l’évasion fiscale en ciblant les cabinets d’avocats et autres consultants qui l’encouragent et qui pourraient risquer de lourdes amendes, selon des propositions soumises à consultation publiées mercredi.

Le HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), la direction des impôts britannique, veut sévir contre tous ceux qui « rendent possible ou utilisent des systèmes d’évasion fiscale », selon le document en consultation publié sur son site Internet. Sont ainsi visés les avocats ou les cabinets de conseil, incontournables à la City de Londres, qui ont un rôle essentiel auprès des grands groupes ou des particuliers fortunés. La principale mesure consisterait à leur infliger une amende équivalente au montant de la somme qui a échappé au fisc.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Au Japon, le Financial Services Agency a annoncé que le Financial System Counsel a publié le rapport intitulé « Working Group on Corporate Disclosure – report on Promoting Constructive Dialogue » (19 juillet 2016).

Petit extrait de ce document :

III. Enhancing disclosure of non-financial information

Non-financial information includes a wide array of information such as governance, social and environmental matters as well as business policies/strategies and MD&A. In recent years, there has been further growing interest in such non-financial information in response to the initiatives to bolster corporate governance and the increasing demand regarding social and environmental issues.

Companies are required to disclose in their Annual Securities Reports information that is necessary and appropriate for the public interest or protection of investors. Accordingly, for example, in cases where social or environmental issues have a material impact on the business or performance of the issuing companies, they are required to disclose such issues in the « MD&A » and « Risk Factors » of the Annual Securities Reports. Also, in recent years, in addition to the improvement of disclosure requirements of governance information in Corporate Governance Reports, a substantial number of companies have taken to disclosing diverse and technical non-financial information in the form of CSR reports and Environment Reports in order to satisfy the wide-ranging information needs of investors and other stakeholders.

To ensure that companies provide non-financial information which meets stakeholders’ needs through creativity and ingenuity, it could be one option to encourage companies to provide non-financial information through voluntary disclosure.

Also note that it might be necessary in the future to make some non-Financial information subject to mandatory disclosure requirements; therefore, it is important to make clear the approach to take for information whose disclosure should be obligatory. In view of the criminal punishments and other heavy sanctions applied to false statements in the Annual Securities Reports, and of the necessity to concisely disclose the information that is truly material for investment decisions, we believe that it would be appropriate to take into account the following elements holistically when considering whether certain non-financial information should expressly be made obligatory:

• Whether the information is truly necessary for investors in making investment decisions;
• Whether the information has become prevalent in the securities market, and has been provided to investors to keep them from being misled;
• Whether the cost borne across the market would be considerable, including, for example, the cost borne by disclosing companies as a
• consequence of making the information disclosure mandatory, and the cost borne by investors to acquire and evaluate the information;
• Whether the request to disclose non-financial information will adversely discourage companies from disclosing useful information, and as a result the overall quality and quantity of information disclosure will decline;
• Whether the disclosure of non-financial information is required by other laws.

Also, as mentioned under « Basic approach, » in order to improve accessibility to corporate information, there are the needs of those investors, especially overseas institutional investors, that companies compile the information that is released across multiple disclosure documents into a single document in an easy-to-understand fashion. In order to address investor needs of this kind, we believe that it is important for companies to consider the way of voluntary disclosure through creativity and ingenuity; some examples may be to unify the information contained in multiple disclosure documents into a single document, or to systematically include hyperlinks to multiple disclosure documents on a single web page.

(…)

3. Investment decisions made from a mid- to long-term perspective

In order to ensure that the corporate disclosure of information leads to sustainable growth and increased corporate value over the mid- to long term, it will be necessary to take further steps encouraging investors to use the information disclosed by companies to make investment decisions grounded in a mid- to long-term perspective.

Such steps may include the following:

• Discuss dialogue between institutional investors and the investee companies of investment, as well as the way in which voting rights are exercised at the Council of Experts Concerning the Follow-up of Japan’s Stewardship Code and Japan’s Corporate Governance Code, so as to make stewardship responsibility more effective in boosting corporate value over the mid- to long term and ensuring sustainable corporate growth.
• Individual investors are generally expected to have the mid- to long term in mind, with shareholders holding shares for over three years on average accounting for about 70%. In view also of the expansion of the defined-contribution pension system and NISA (Nippon Individual Savings Account: a system for the tax exemption of small investments), further intensify education toward mid- to long-term-oriented investing in the context of the initiatives undertaken by the Japan Securities Dealers Association and other organizations to improve the literacy of individual investors.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian