Normes d’encadrement

Le Financial Reporting Council (FRC) a annoncé à la mi-février 2017 qu’il souhaitait faire évoluer le code de gouvernance des entreprises britanniques. Aussi, le FRC va-t-il procéder à une revue de son code pour obtenir des commentaires.

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has today announced plans for a fundamental review of the UK Corporate Governance Code. This will take account of work done by the FRC on corporate culture and succession planning, and the issues raised in the Government’s Green Paper and the BEIS Select Committee inquiry. The review will build on the Codes globally recognised strengths developed over the past 25 years while considering the appropriate balance between its principles and provisions and the growing demands on the corporate governance framework.

Les objectifs annoncés sont :

This will consider the appropriate balance between the Code’s principles and provisions.  In pursuing any changes, the current strengths of UK governance: the unitary board, strong shareholder rights, the role of stewardship and the ‘comply or explain’ approach, must be preserved. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Dans un article paru le 2 février 2017 (« CEOs share their views on corporate governance reform », The Telegraph), des PDG et des chefs de la haute-direction partage leur analyse de la réforme proposée par Theresa May.

So what changes, in what could be the most significant reform of corporate governance since the 2005 Greenbury report, is the paper proposing to make – and how are business leaders responding?

Morceaux choisis :

• “Unions are angry that the proposal to have workers on boards has been dropped, in favour of advisory panels for workers and consumers, and the allocation of special responsibilities to non-executives. Large private companies will be dismayed about proposals about new rules for them. They may argue that this has been based on the poor behaviour of a small minority.”
• “The paper toes a very careful line – raising important questions – and then delivering fairly watered-down recommendations. For example, the paper suggests a binding annual shareholder vote on executive pay, but excludes some elements of executive pay packages from the vote.
• “I welcome any effort that encourages business to do the right thing, but corporate governance is about so much more than regulating executive pay. The boardroom sets the standard for the whole of the business and must be accountable for that ».
• « For reform to be taken forward, business leaders should be encouraged to focus on changes that drive long-term prospects ».

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Le 10 octobre, The National Law Review a publié un article intéressant revenant sur la situation britannique et les réformes à venir en gouvernance d’entreprise : « UK Corporate Governance: Change Has Got to Come! ».

A number of themes trailed in UK’s Theresa May’s first speech after securing the Conservative nomination, were repeated at last week’s Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. The new Government reiterated its intention to occupy the centre ground of British politics and the delivery of this political objective will undoubtedly have implications for corporate Britain – in the words of the Prime Minister “ a change has got to come.”

At the moment we are short on detail, but the Government has promised to publish plans later this year to have consumers and workers represented on company boards of directors. Speech soundbites also focussed on executive pay, the taxation of international business and the payment of excessive dividends, together with a more general promise to protect and enhance workers’ rights.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

« La concurrence fiscale est réamorcée » ! C’est sous ce titre que Mme Marie Charrel publie un article dans Le Devoir rappelant que la RSE prend un visage particulier dès le droit fiscal est abordé.

C’est reparti. Lundi, la première ministre du Royaume-Uni, Theresa May, a déclaré devant le patronat britannique qu’elle s’assurerait que son pays ait l’un des taux d’imposition sur les sociétés (IS) « les plus faibles des vingt principales économies mondiales ». Celui-ci doit passer de 20 % à 17 % d’ici à 2020 — voire à 15 % dans la foulée, selon des rumeurs publiées par la presse britannique. Les propos de Mme May ont aussitôt été critiqués par le ministre des Finances allemand, Wolfgang Schäuble.

Le Royaume-Uni n’est pourtant pas le seul à miser sur une baisse de l’imposition des bénéfices pour tenter de séduire les entreprises. Il y a quelques jours, la Hongrie a annoncé qu’elle baisserait son taux d’IS (l’impôt sur les sociétés) à 9 % en 2017, tandis que le Luxembourg réduira le sien de 21 % à 18 % en 2018. « Après une pause pendant la crise, puis les efforts sur la transparence des pratiques, la concurrence fiscale entre les États européens est repartie, sous une forme renouvelée », constate Jean-Pierre Lieb, avocat associé chez Ernst Young.

Hors du Vieux Continent, le Mexique, la Chine, l’Australie ou encore Israël ont également annoncé des baisses ciblées de l’IS cette année. Sans oublier les États-Unis. Le président élu Donald Trump a en effet promis de réduire celui-ci de 35 % à 15 %, et même d’offrir un taux de 10 % aux multinationales américaines acceptant de rapatrier leurs liquidités placées à l’étranger.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Le journal The Guardian publie un article revenant sur la contribution faite au Parlement britannique par le business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee sur la future réforme de la gouvernance d’entreprise : « MPs’ corporate governance inquiry: what are the key issues? ».

Parliament launches a series of hearings on reforming British boardrooms on Tuesday, as MPs pledge to ensure Theresa May fulfils her promise to clean up big business.

The business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) committee is collecting evidence for its own investigation into corporate governance, while the government’s own consultation is expected to start before Christmas.

In her brief campaign to become Conservative party leader, May hit out against the gap between directors’ pay and the wider workforce, while raising the idea of putting workers on boards. Iain Wright, chair of the BEIS committee, said: “I hope she’s not rolling back.”

The submissions to the committee’s corporate governance probe offer ideas to tackle executive pay – the average boss earned £5.5m in 2015, up from just under £5m the year before – and provide clues to the other topics that will be debated in the months ahead.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Réflexion de Hayley Robinson sur l’introduction de la représentation des salariés au sein du CA : « Employees on the board: Theresa May’s next big idea? » (Lexology, 22 septembre 2016). L’auteure revient dans ce billet sur b.a-ba entourant cette participation, sur les avantages et les inconvénients et sur l’opportunité de la mettre en place en Grande-Bretagne.

Reviewing corporate governance appears high on the new Government’s agenda. Along with executive remuneration and a greater role for shareholders in the nomination and appointment of directors, there are signs of a greater role for employees too.

In one of her first speeches after having secured the Conservative nomination, Theresa May said this:

“I want to see changes in the way that big business is governed. The people who run big businesses are supposed to be accountable to outsiders, to non-executive directors, who are supposed to ask the difficult questions, think about the longterm and defend the interests of shareholders. In practice, they are drawn from the same, narrow social and professional circles as the executive team and – as we have seen time and time again – the scrutiny they provide is just not good enough. So if I’m Prime Minister, we’re going to change that system – and we’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well.”

Introducing a requirement to have employees on company boards would represent a major structural change in the UK corporate governance regime, moving it closer to the German model where collaborative decision-making has been the norm for several decades. Mrs May has not yet brought forward any detailed plans to assist firms in understanding precisely what she intends to introduce.

Qu’en penser ?

Whether or not Mrs May’s Government proceeds with any move to introduce mandatory employee participation on boards remains to be seen. Even if it does, it seems unlikely that worker representation will reach the scale and power it has in German corporations. The UK’s single company board model, and the fact that boards might range from the very small to the very large makes it harder to devise sensible numerical limits that would fit all UK companies. The very strict statutory duties imposed on UK directors might also prove a difficult hurdle – will worker representatives be directors? If not, will they simply be second-class citizens on the board?

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Marc T. Moore offre un beau papier sur la place de la valeur actionnariale en Grande-Bretagne dans une perspective historique : « Shareholder Primacy, Labour and the Historic Ambivalence of UK Company Law » (Oxford University, 20 septembre 2016).

Most directors and senior managers of British companies would likely regard it as trite law that, in undertaking their functions, they are accountable first and foremost to their employer firm’s general body of shareholders. It follows that the interests of other corporate constituencies – and, in particular, those of employees – must ultimately cede to those of shareholders in the event of conflict. Although frequently taken for granted today, the lexical priority that the British company law framework affords to the interests of shareholders is remarkable, not least when viewed alongside the correspondingly disempowered corporate governance status of labour in the UK.

On first reflection, it is somewhat curious that the interests of employees have not figured more prominently within British company law, especially when one considers the general political disposition of the country in modern times. Throughout the course of the last century, the UK has witnessed 37 years of Labour government (or 42 years if one includes Labour’s participation in the wartime coalition government). And although the UK is acknowledged on the whole as having a more neo-liberal (ie right-wing) political orientation than many of its northern European counterparts, it nonetheless has a comparatively strong social-democratic (ie left-wing) political tradition in relation to other English-speaking and former-Commonwealth countries, at least since the Second World War. It is thus not unreasonable to expect that, at some point during the post-war era, democratic public policy measures might have been taken to effect the direct integration of worker interests into the heart of the British corporate legal structure.

Une de ses conclusion est intéressante :

However, whilst the centrality of shareholders’ interests to the doctrinal and normative fabric of contemporary UK company law is both manifest and incontrovertible, this has curiously not always been the case. With respect to the fundamental question of the proper corporate objective (that is, as to whose interest British company directors are expected to serve while carrying out their functions), UK company law up until 2006 adopted a highly ambiguous position. Moreover, British company law has in the fairly recent past come precariously close to adopting a radically different board representation model, in which worker interests would formally have shared centre-stage with those of shareholders in a similar vein to the traditional German corporate governance model.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian