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Dans Le Monde, Mme Cécile Boutelet propose une belle synthèse de réformes à venir du côté allemand suite au scandale Wirecard : « Après le scandale Wirecard, la finance allemande à la veille d’une profonde réforme » (Le Monde, 26 octobre 2020).

Extrait :

Après les révélations sur l’entreprise, qui avait manipulé son bilan, un projet de loi en discussion souhaite notamment renforcer les pouvoirs du gendarme de la Bourse allemand.

La finance allemande a-t-elle des pratiques malsaines ? Depuis la faillite au mois de juin de l’ancienne star de la finance Wirecard, après qu’elle a reconnu avoir lourdement manipulé son bilan, les révélations sur l’affaire se sont accumulées, soulignant les graves insuffisances du système de contrôle des marchés financiers outre-Rhin. Des manquements qui sont devenus un enjeu politique majeur. Sous pression, le ministre des finances, Olaf Scholz, pousse en faveur d’une réforme rapide du système. Son projet de loi, en discussion depuis mercredi 21 octobre dans les ministères, doit être voté « avant l’été », a-t-il annoncé.

Le texte, porté également par la ministre de la justice, Christine Lambrecht, révèle en creux les limites de l’approche allemande en matière de surveillance des entreprises cotées, et le tournant culturel amorcé par le scandale Wirecard. Le système reposait jusqu’ici sur la responsabilisation et la participation consensuelle des sociétés au processus de contrôle des bilans. L’examen des comptes était confié non pas à la BaFin, le gendarme allemand de la Bourse, mais à une association privée, la DPR (« organisme de contrôle des bilans »), qui disposait de très peu de moyens réels. L’affaire Wirecard a montré l’impuissance de cette approche dans le cas d’une fraude délibérément orchestrée. La future loi doit renforcer considérablement les pouvoirs de la BaFin, qui disposera d’un droit d’investigation pour examiner elle-même les bilans des entreprise

(…) Les cabinets d’audit, dont le manque de zèle à alerter sur les irrégularités de bilan a été mis au jour par le scandale, devront aussi se soumettre à une réforme. Leur mandat au service d’une même entreprise ne pourra excéder dix ans. Le projet de loi exige qu’une séparation plus nette soit faite, au sein de ces cabinets, entre leur activité d’audit et leur activité de conseil, afin d’éviter les conflits d’intérêts.

À la prochaine…

CFA Institute a proposé des standards en matière de divulgation des critères ESG dans les produits financiers : « Consulter Paper on the Development of the CFA Institute – ESG Disclosure Standards For Investments Products » (août 2020).

• Pour un article de presse : ici

Petit extrait :

• Disclosure Requirements Many of the Standard’s requirements will be related to disclosures. Disclosure requirements are a key way to provide transparency and comparability for investors. A disclosure requirement is simply a means of ensuring that asset managers communicate certain information to investors. There are different ways that disclosures might be required, both in terms of scope and method. Therefore, it is necessary to establish principles to ensure the disclosure requirements meet the purpose of the Standard. We propose the following design principles:

• Disclosure requirements should focus on relevant, useful information. Disclosures must provide information that will help investors better understand investment products, make comparisons, and choose among alternatives. • Disclosure requirements should focus primarily on ESG-related features. Because the goal of the Standard is to enable greater transparency and comparability of investment products with ESG-related features, the Standard’s disclosure requirements should focus on these features. Focusing the disclosure requirements on ESG-related features also avoids adding unnecessarily to an asset manager’s disclosure burden.

• Disclosure requirements should allow asset managers the flexibility to make the required disclosure in the clearest possible manner given the nature of the product. Disclosure requirements can easily be reformulated as questions. There are two types of questions—open-ended and closed-ended. Open-ended questions ask who, what, why, where, when, or how. Closed-ended questions require answers in a specific form—either yes/no or selected from a predefined list. The open-ended disclosure requirement format provides the flexibility needed for the Standard to be relevant on a global scale and to pertain to all types of investment products with ESG-related features. The open-ended nature of the disclosure requirements, however, must be balanced to a certain degree with a standardization of responses for the sake of comparison by investors. The forthcoming Exposure Draft will include examples of openended and standardized disclosures.

• The disclosure requirements should aim to elicit a moderate level of detail. An investment product’s disclosures should accurately and adequately represent the policies and procedures that govern the design and implementation of the investment product. The Standard’s disclosure requirements can be thought of as a step between a database search and a due diligence conversation. The disclosures will provide more detail than can be standardized and presented in a database but less detail than the information one can obtain through a full due diligence process.

• The disclosure requirements should prioritize content over format. The disclosure requirements will focus on what information is disclosed rather than how it is disclosed. The Standard will provide a certain degree of flexibility in the format for information presentation. Providing latitude in the format is intended to reduce an asset manager’s disclosure burden and allow for harmonization with disclosures required by regulatory bodies and other standards. The Exposure Draft will offer examples of presentation formats. • Disclosure requirements should be categorized as “general” or “feature-specific”. The Standard will have both general and feature-specific disclosure requirements. General disclosure requirements will apply to all investment products that seek to comply with the Standard. Feature-specific disclosure requirements will apply only to investment products that have a specific ESG-related feature.

• The Standard should include disclosure recommendations in addition to requirements. We anticipate that in addition to the Standard’s required disclosures, the Standard will have recommended disclosures as well. Required disclosures represent the minimum information that must be disclosed in order to comply with the Standard. Recommended disclosures provide additional information that investors may find helpful in their decision making. Recommended disclosures are encouraged but not mandatory.

À la prochaine…

A la suite de la publication le 11 mars 2020 de la position-recommandation DOC-2020-03 visant à assurer une proportionnalité entre la réalité de la prise en compte des facteurs extra-financiers dans la gestion et la place qui leur est réservée dans la communication aux investisseurs, l’AMF publie une première mise à jour de cette doctrine. Je vous laisse découvrir le tableau offert par l’AMF sur l’avant et l’après modification…

• AMF, « Finance durable et gestion collective : l’AMF publie une mise à jour de sa doctrine en matière d’information des investisseurs », 27 juillet 2020

Extrait :

Adéquation de la communication et de l’importance de la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers dans la gestion

Jusqu’alors, la position-recommandation DOC-2020-03 prévoyait une distinction binaire : soit le placement collectif disposait d’une prise en compte significativement engageante sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers et il pouvait alors communiquer de façon centrale sur ces aspects, soit l’approche n’atteignait pas ces standards minimaux et il devait se contenter d’une communication « très brève et très proportionnée » dans sa documentation commerciale sur la prise en compte de ces critères.

La position-recommandation prévoit désormais, aux côtés de la possibilité de communiquer de façon centrale sur les aspects extra-financiers, la possibilité d’une communication dite ‘réduite’ pour les fonds qui prennent en compte dans leur gestion les critères extra-financiers sans en faire un engagement significatif. L’introduction de cette communication « réduite » sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers poursuit deux objectifs principaux :

• Augmentation de la granularité: elle permettra de mieux distinguer entre elles des approches qui n’étaient jusqu’alors autorisées qu’à avoir une communication « très brève et très proportionnée » alors qu’elles mettent en œuvre des approches d’ambitions très variables, reflétant de manière plus adaptée la diversité des approches mises en œuvre par les sociétés de gestion dans ce domaine ;
• Renforcement des exigences pour les approches n’atteignant pas les standards minimaux pour prétendre à une communication « réduite » : ces approches ne pourront plus communiquer sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers, en dehors de mentions dans leurs prospectus, là où une communication très brève et très proportionnée était possible jusqu’alors dans les documents commerciaux.

Les standards minimaux associés à la possibilité de se prévaloir d’une communication ‘réduite’ et devant figurer dans la documentation légale du placement collectif portent sur le fait de disposer d’une couverture significative d’analyse extra-financière (dont la portée est différenciée en fonction de la classe d’actifs) et d’assurer que la note ou l’indicateur moyen du placement collectif soit supérieure à la note ou l’indicateur moyen de l’univers d’investissement.

(…)

Communication centrale sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers pour certaines approches basées sur des indicateurs extra-financiers

La position-recommandation DOC-2020-03 mentionnait jusqu’alors deux approches présumées significativement engageantes et pouvant donc communiquer de façon centrale sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers. Ces approches, également reconnues par le label ISR Français, portent sur une exclusion significative de l’univers investissable et une amélioration significative de la note extra-financière du placement collectif (par exemple : moyenne pondérée de plusieurs critères portant sur des indicateurs sur les piliers environnementaux, sociaux et de gouvernance). Dans les autres cas, les SGP doivent être en mesure de démontrer à l’AMF en quoi leur approche est significative.

Cette mise à jour de la doctrine vise à expliciter la présomption du caractère significativement engageant à d’autres approches basées sur des indicateurs extra-financiers (émissions de gaz à effet de serre, équité femme-homme…) et non uniquement sur des notes extra-financières. Les standards minimaux associés sont comparables à ceux actuellement requis pour les approches significativement engageantes basées sur des notes extra-financières.

Cette extension est une nouvelle étape dans la reconnaissance d’approches pouvant communiquer de façon centrale sur la prise en compte de critères extra-financiers et pourrait être complétée à l’avenir.

Recommandations relatives aux politiques de gestion de controverses et d’engagement actionnarial

Enfin, la position-recommandation DOC-2020-03 est enrichie de deux recommandations relatives à la formalisation de politique de gestion de controverses et le contenu des politiques d’engagement actionnarial. Ces recommandations constituent des premières avancées de la doctrine de l’AMF sur ces thématiques d’importance pour la finance durable et pourront être complétées à l’avenir.

À la prochaine…

Où s’en va l’UE avec le devoir de vigilance ? M. Farid Baddache propose une synthèse avec des pistes de réflexions : « L’UE veut un devoir de vigilance sur les droits humains obligatoire en 2021 » (Ksapas, 4 juin 2020).

Résumé :

Depuis plus de 10 ans, les entreprises appliquent les Principes Directeurs des Nations Unies sur les Entreprises et les Droits de l’Homme. Faisant écho à de multiples réglementations nationales – notamment en Californie, en France, au Royaume-Uni, aux Pays-Bas ou en Allemagne – la Commission Européenne a annoncé la mise en œuvre d’une directive sur la diligence raisonnable obligatoire en matière de Droits Humains en 2021. Quels sont les retours des entreprises à date ? Une directive européenne peut-elle imposer le respect des Droits Humains sur l’ensemble des chaînes d’approvisionnement, au-delà de ce qui existe déjà ? Quel impact la pandémie Covid-19 pourrait-elle avoir sur son éventuelle application ?

À la prochaine…

Billet à lire de Frederick Alexander et al. : « From Shareholder Primacy to Stakeholder Capitalism » (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 26 octobre 2020).

Extrait :

This policy agenda includes the following categories of interventions required for a broad transition to Stakeholder Capitalism.

We have drafted proposed Federal legislative language, “The Stakeholder Capitalism Act,” attached in Exhibit A of the full paper linked to below, which incorporates each of the following ideas:

Responsible Institutions: We propose that the trustees of institutional investors be required to consider certain economic, social, and environmental effects of their decisions on the interests of their beneficiaries with respect to stewardship of companies within their portfolios. This clarified understanding of fiduciary duty will ensure that institutional investors use their authority to further the real interests of those beneficiaries who have stakes in all aspects of the economy, environment, and society. These changes can be achieved through an amendment to the Investment Company Act of 1940 (15 U.S.C. 80a) by inserting language after paragraph (54) of Section 2 and after subsection (c) of Section 36.

Responsible Companies: Just as trustees of invested funds must expand their notion of the interests of their beneficiaries, the companies in which they invest must also expand the understanding of the interests of the economic owners of their shares, who are more often than not those same beneficiaries. We propose a federal requirement that any corporation or other business entity involved in interstate commerce be formed under a state statute that requires directors and officers to account for the impact of corporate actions not only on financial returns, but also on the viability of the social, natural, and political systems that affect all stakeholders. This change can be achieved through the addition of a new Chapter 2F of Title 15 of the U.S. Code.

Tools for Institutional Accountability: In order to allow beneficiaries to hold institutional investors accountable for the impact of their stewardship on all the interests of beneficiaries, we propose laws that mandate disclosure as to how they are meeting their responsibility to consider these broad interests, including disclosure of proxy voting and engagement with companies. We propose that the Securities and Exchange Commission should promulgate rules requiring each investment company and each employee benefit plan required to file an annual report under section 103 of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

Tools for Company Accountability: Corporate and securities laws that govern businesses must also be changed in order to give institutional investors the tools to meet their enhanced responsibilities. This will include requiring large companies to meet new standards for disclosure regarding stakeholder impact as an important element of their accountability. This proposal can be achieved through an amendment added to The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78a et seq.) after section 13A.

(…)

This tension cannot be wished away. The White Paper proposes a solution: rules that facilitate and encourage investor-sanctioned guardrails. Such guardrails would allow shareholders to insist that all companies that they own forgo profits earned through the exploitation of people and planet. Unlike executives, the institutional shareholders who control the markets are diversified, so that their success rises and falls with the success of the economy, rather than any single company. This means that these institutions suffer when individual companies pursue profits with practices that harm the economy. We believe that by leveling the competitive playing field, these changes will pave the way for the type of corporate behavior imagined by the New Paradigm, the Davos Manifesto and the Business Roundtable Statement.

Indeed, far from being “state corporatism,” as the memo claims, what we propose is “human capitalism,” where the workers, citizens, and other humans whose savings fund corporations are given a say in the kind of world they live in. Will it be one in which all compete in a manner that rejects unjust profits? Or, in contrast, will it be one in which corporations continue to lobby against regulation that protects workers while the corporate executives make 300 times the median salary of workers?

À la prochaine…

Luca Enriques a publié un intéressant billet sur l’Oxford Business Law Blog : « Missing in Friedman’s Shareholder Value Maximization Credo: The Shareholders » (25 septembre 2020).

Extrait :

What Friedman’s Essay Says

As Alex Edmans has noted here,

‘Friedman’s article is widely misquoted and misunderstood. Indeed, thousands of people may have cited it without reading past the title. They think they don’t need to, because the title already makes his stance clear: companies should maximize profits by price-gouging customers, underpaying workers, and polluting the environment’.

That is not, of course, what Friedman wrote. According to Friedman:

1. Talking about the ‘social responsibility of business’ makes no sense because the responsibility lies with people. Public corporations are legal persons and may have their responsibilities, but they act through their directors and managers. Therefore, attention must be focused on the responsibilities of such players.
2. Managers are employees of corporations, which in turn are owned by their shareholders. Therefore, managers must act in accordance with the wishes of the shareholders. Unless the shareholders themselves explicitly determine an altruistic purpose, this means ‘conduct[ing] the business in accordance with [shareholders’] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom’.
3. If managers also had a social responsibility, they would find themselves in the position of having to act against the interests of shareholders, for example by hiring the ‘hardcore’ unemployed to combat poverty instead of hiring the most capable workers. By doing so, they would spend shareholders’ money to pursue a general interest. In other words, they would impose a tax on shareholders and also decide how to use its proceeds. Yet, it is countered, if there are serious and urgent economic and environmental problems, then it is necessary that managers face them without waiting for politicians’ action, which is always late and imperfect. According to Friedman, it is undemocratic for private individuals using other people’s money (and, importantly, exploiting the monopolistic rents of the large corporations they lead) to impose on the community their political preferences on how to solve urgent economic and environmental problems, which should instead be addressed through the democratic process.
4. The market is based on the unanimity rule; in ‘an ideal free market’, there is no exchange without the consent of those who participate in it. Politics, on the other hand, operate according to the conformity principle, whereby a majority binds the dissenting minority. The intervention of politics is necessary because the market is imperfect. But the social responsibility doctrine would extend the mechanisms of politics to the market sphere, since a private subject (enjoying some monopoly power) would impose its political will on others.
5. Often, the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is just a public relations exercise to justify managerial choices already consistent with the interests of shareholders. Looking after the well-being of employees, devoting resources to the firm’s local communities, and so on may well be (and, as a rule, will be) in the long-term interest of corporations. Indeed, cloaking these actions under the label of CSR, as it was fashionable to do in 1970 (and is again today), can in itself contribute to increasing profits.

Missing from Friedman’s Picture: The Shareholders

Friedman’s essay assigned a totally passive role to what he calls the corporation’s ‘owners’ or ‘the employers’—that is, the shareholders. They are merely the beneficiaries of directors’ duty to increase profits, but they have no role to play in pursuing that very goal other than (as he notes in passing) when they elect the board.

That’s understandable. When Friedman wrote his piece, the shareholders of US companies were mostly individuals and rarely voted at annual meetings other than to rubber-stamp managers’ proposals. Today, a large majority of listed firms’ shares are held by institutional investors—that is, managers of other people’s funds. Institutions have become key players at US (as well as non-US) listed corporations (eg, this OECD study with data from across the world), because they regularly vote portfolio shares at shareholder meetings. And their pro-management vote is nowadays anything but certain.

This creates one additional layer of employee/employer relationships, to use Friedman’s terminology (today, we would say principal/agent relationships): the one between the institutions holding shares or (as Friedman saw it) their own managers, and the individuals (usually workers and pensioners) whose funds the managers invest. (To be sure, it is often more complicated than that because some institutions, such as pension funds, often delegate their asset management to other institutions; but this is not relevant for the purposes of my analysis).

Friedman’s essay raises the question: is there any room for asset managers to assume social responsibility duties in deciding how to invest and how to vote? In Friedman’s logic, the answer should be ‘no’, and it’s easy to imagine that he would chastise those fund managers who portray themselves (not always veritably) as socially responsible investors. Like corporate managers, fund managers manage other people’s money and should not grant themselves the license to make political choices, which will inevitably please some of their beneficiaries and not others. Their only goal should be giving their clients the highest returns on the funds invested.

Of course, much like a corporation can be set up with an altruistic (or mixed) purpose, so can asset management products expressly be marketed as socially responsible or ethically-investing. Intuitively, investors in such funds expect them to invest and vote in accordance with the socially responsible commitments undertaken. But absent a CSR connotation—namely, if the mutual fund has been marketed as a tool for generating financial returns—fund managers have to assume that the fund’s investors have a financial objective in mind and do not expect their own political preferences to be promoted by their fund manager, especially if that comes to the detriment of their return. Whether implicitly or explicitly, that’s the bargain with each of the fund shares buyers.

However, things are not always so straightforward. Passive institutional investors replicating indexes and, therefore, holding the entire market rather than picking stocks now hold more than 40 percent of the US stock market. As Madison Condon and Jack Coffee have noticed—here and here, respectively—for investors of that kind, portfolio value maximization may well mean pushing for ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) policies at the individual company level that, while not necessarily profitable for that company, will increase portfolio returns by making other companies more profitable. Think, for instance, of systemically important financial institutions adopting more conservative risk management policies that significantly reduce the chances of a potentially devastating financial crisis.

Hence, the overlap between socially responsible and profit-maximizing behavior, which Friedman himself acknowledged to be present at the individual company level and criticized only as being politically dangerous, is now even more pervasive at the institutional shareholder level.

In theory, all portfolio value maximizers’ decisions on ESG matters should be based on an assessment of the effects that the adoption of a given policy by an individual portfolio company would have, both on its value and on the value of the totality of other portfolio companies. Because ESG policies require widespread adoption to be effective, different scenarios will have to be elaborated and factored in to estimate those effects. Multiple other variables will have to be considered and a number of questionable assumptions made.

Passive investors, like any organization, are unlikely to have the human and financial resources to fully engage with this kind of assessment, let alone reach solid conclusions. And it would be naïve to assume that political preferences do not affect the simplified analysis they inevitably resort to in determining their ESG preferences.

Owing to shareholder pressure and/or managers’ desire to retain their jobs, the ESG preferences of portfolio value-maximizing institutions may well trickle down to the individual portfolio company level. Under what conditions that is the case will depend on a number of factors, including whether the company is protected from competition, undiversified shareholders’ stakes in the company, how politically divisive the socially responsible action is, and so on. Yet in some cases, and in respect of some of the socially and politically sensitive issues, managers will yield to those preferences. Given Friedman’s premise that ‘increasing profits’ must be the only corporate goal because the shareholders are the owners/employers, there is some irony to that.

Irony aside, today’s corporate world is very different from the one Milton Friedman wrote in. Yet, his essay still provides a useful framework for understanding the implications of managing companies for one purpose or another. And perhaps also for answering the reframed question of whether corporate managers should cater to the preferences of their portfolio-value-maximizing indexing investors when making decisions on behalf of their corporations.

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…