autres publications Gouvernance normes de droit
Gouvernance d’entreprise : le Parlement britannique lance une consultation
Ivan Tchotourian 19 septembre 2016
En Grande-Bretagne, The Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS) Committee vient de lancer une consultation publique sur la gouvernance d’entreprise : « Corporate Governance inquiry launched ».
The Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS) Committee has today launched an inquiry on corporate governance, focussing on executive pay, directors duties, and the composition of boardrooms, including worker representation and gender balance in executive positions.
Les questions abordées sont très intéressantes :
Directors Duties
- Is company law sufficiently clear on the roles of directors and non-executive directors, and are those duties the right ones? If not, how should it be amended?
- Is the duty to promote the long-term success of the company clear and enforceable?
- How are the interests of shareholders, current and former employees best balanced?
- How best should the decisions of Boards be scrutinised and open to challenge?
- Should there be greater alignment between the rules governing public and private companies? What would be the consequences of this?
- Should additional duties be placed on companies to promote greater transparency, e.g. around the roles of advisors. If so, what should be published and why? What would the impact of this be on business behaviour and costs to business?
- How effectively have the provisions of the 1992 Cadbury report been embedded? How best can shareholders have confidence that Executives are subject to independent challenge?
- Should Government regulate or rely on guidance and professional bodies to ensure that Directors fulfil their duties effectively?
Executive pay
- What factors have influenced the steep rise in executive pay over the past 30 years relative to salaries of more junior employees?
- How should executive pay take account of companies’ long-term performance?
- Should executive pay reflect the value added by executives to companies relative to more junior employees? If so, how?
- What evidence is there that executive pay is too high? How, if at all, should Government seek to influence or control executive pay?
- Do recent high-profile shareholder actions demonstrate that the current framework for controlling executive pay is bedding in effectively? Should shareholders have a greater role?
Composition of Boards
- What evidence is there that more diverse company boards perform better?
- How should greater diversity of board membership be achieved? What should diversity include, e.g. gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, disability, experience, socio-economic background?
- Should there be worker representation on boards and/or remuneration committees? If so, what form should this take?
- What more should be done to increase the number of women in Executive positions on boards?
Attention : la réponse est à envoyer pour le 26 octobre 2016 !
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications Gouvernance place des salariés
Employee Participation in Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility : à découvrir !
Ivan Tchotourian 23 août 2016
Nouveau working paper de Martin Gelter pour le compte de l’ECGI intitulé : « Employee Participation in Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility » (Law Working Paper No. 322/2016, juillet 2016).
The chapter investigates the impact of employee participation on the board of directors or supervisory board (particularly codetermination) on corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Conceptually, it is important to distinguish between “internal” and “external” CSR. Internal CSR relates to practices of the firm regarding groups with which it is in a long-term contractual relationship such as employees. Employee participation systems serve to protect employees from shareholder opportunism and shift the balance in the distribution of corporate rents in favor of employees, which is why they clearly have an impact on internal CSR. The situation is much less clear for external CSR, which is concerned with effects of corporate activities that are externalities, for example pollution.
I argue that there may sometimes be a tradeoff between internal and external CSR: If a firm is more profitable because it scores badly in terms of external CSR (e.g. because it habitually pollutes), employees may benefit similarly as shareholders. In fact, the interests of shareholders and employees may be largely aligned in this respect, with both either benefiting or being harmed concurrently.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications
La gouvernance en chiffre (un billet à consommer sans modération !)
Ivan Tchotourian 10 août 2016
Mon collègue Jacques Grisé publie sur son blog un billet très intéressant tiré du Harvard Law School Forum (Corporate Governance by the Numbers de Ann Yerger, EY Center for Board Matters) : « La gouvernance en chiffre ».
Ce billet présente les principales données sur la gouvernance des sociétés américaines en les présentant sous forme chiffrée. L’auteur a compilé les données de plus de 3 000 sociétés publiques aux États-Unis, en les présentant selon les 5 indices les plus importants : S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, S&P SmallCap 600, S&P 1500 et Russell 3000.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications Gouvernance Normes d'encadrement
Comparer la gouvernance d’entreprise : étude de Martin Gelter
Ivan Tchotourian 4 août 2016
Martin Gelter (professeur à Fordham) nous offre un très bel article « Comparative Corporate Governance: Old and New » pour le compte de l’ECGI (Law Working Paper No. 321/2016). Si vous vous intéressez à la comparaison en matière de gouvernance d’entreprise, c’est un incontournable !
The most fundamental comparative corporate governance debates have often focused on two issues.
The first one concerns ownership structure: Why are large corporations in some corporate governance system owned by a multitude of disempowered shareholders, thus effectively giving management free rein? Why are corporations typically governed by a controlling shareholder or a coalition of controlling shareholders in other systems?
The second issue is the role of other ‘constituencies’ of the corporation besides shareholders, of which labor is most central to the debate. Some jurisdictions explicitly give labor an influential voice in corporate affairs, whereas in others its influence is developed through factual power or unintended consequences of legislation.
This chapter explores the interactions between firm ownership and labor, focusing on the United States on the one hand and Continental Europe, particularly Germany, on the other. It distinguishes between ‘old’ and ‘new’ comparative corporate governance, the former referring to the dichotomy studied by scholars of comparative corporate law up to the early 2000s. Recent changes, heralded by intermediated, but widespread share ownership are leading us to a new equilibrium whose contours have only begun to emerge.
Over the past decades, outside investors have gained power both in the United States and in Continental Europe. However, neither in the US nor in Continental Europe has the traditional corporate governance system been completely superseded by a new one. The US remains to a large extent manager-centric. Continental Europe retains powerful large shareholders, and labor as an independent force has remained more important than in the United States. Outside institutional investors – sometimes from the US – have become a player to be reckoned with, thus adding an additional layer of complexity to the system.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications mission et composition du conseil d'administration Normes d'encadrement Nouvelles diverses place des salariés
Système allemand de codétermination : un modèle exportable ?
Ivan Tchotourian 22 juillet 2016
Alors que Theresa May a fait part de son intérêt d’importer en Grande-Bretagne le système allemand, MM. Horst Eidenmüller, Mathias Habersack, Caspar Behme et Lars Klöhn reviennent sur la pertinence de cette proposition en jetant un regard prudent (de chercheurs !) sur ce système : « Corporate Co-Determination German-Style as a Model for the UK? » (18 juillet 2016).
On 13 July 2016, Theresa May took up office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Only shortly before, she had made headlines when she proposed to adopt European-style worker representation on the boards of leading companies.
Corporate co-determination hence seems to gain a certain degree of popularity with the British government – which is highly astonishing, considering that it was the UK which most fiercely fought against co-determination on a European level. It was mainly the diverging views of the UK and Germany on co-determination which have thwarted projects like the Draft Fifth Company Law Directive or the establishment of a European Private Company (Societas Privata Europaea, SPE). It is downright ironic that while the UK now shows an interest in co-determination, the concept is being questioned in Germany after decades of lying dormant. The reason for the new German discussion of co-determination are doubts regarding the compatibility of its specific form of co-determination with higher-ranking Union law. This post provides a brief overview of the most recent developments in German co-determination law that were the focus of a joint Oxford/Munich conference at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich in March 2016.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications Gouvernance objectifs de l'entreprise Valeur actionnariale vs. sociétale
Reclaiming the idea of shareholder value
Ivan Tchotourian 13 juillet 2016
Michael J. Mauboussin et Alfred Rappaport ont publié il y a quelques jours un article dans la Harvard Business Review qui revient sur la valeur actionnariale : « Reclaiming the Idea of Shareholder Value ». Les auteurs insistent sur l’importance de définir et de communiquer clairement l’objectif des entreprises.
Corporate governance issues are constantly in the headlines. Activist investors challenge management strategies. Investors and others ask why companies binge on buybacks while skimping on value-creating investment opportunities. But discussions of corporate governance invariably miss the real problem: most public companies have extensive governance procedures but no governing objective. As a result, there is no sound basis for stakeholders, including shareholders, to assess the performance of the company and its executives.
Corporate governance is a system of checks and balances that a company designs to ensure that it faithfully serves its governing objective. The governing objective is the cornerstone upon which the organization builds its culture, communications, and choices about how it allocates capital. Think of it as a clear statement of what a company is fundamentally trying to achieve.
Today there are two camps that aim to define the idea of governing objective, but neither is effective. The first believes the company’s goal is to maximize shareholder value. Countries that operate under common law, including the United States and the United Kingdom, lean in this direction.
The second advocates that the company balance the interests of all stakeholders. Countries that operate under civil law, including France, Germany, and Japan, tend to be in this camp.
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Ivan Tchotourian
autres publications
Les nouveaux enjeux de la gouvernance d’entreprise
Ivan Tchotourian 13 juillet 2016
The conversation relaie l’introduction de la Conférence internationale de gouvernance CIG 2016 à l’Université de Montpellier : « Gouvernance et gouvernementalité à l’heure du big data : quels enjeux pour les entreprises ? ».
La 15e conférence internationale de gouvernance (CIG 2016) de l’AAIG (Association Académique Internationale de Gouvernance) qui s’est tenue les 17 et 18 mai 2016 à l’IAE de Montpellier a été l’occasion de débattre sur les nouveaux enjeux de la gouvernance d’entreprise. Les chercheurs en gouvernance sont au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines de management.
À l’origine, les recherches en gouvernance se sont principalement appuyées sur la théorie de l’agence (…) et centrées sur la grande entreprise de type managérial, où la relation plus ou moins conflictuelle entre actionnaires et dirigeants est prééminente. Ces problématiques classiques ne sont pas figées, elles sont régulièrement revisitées et restent d’actualité, comme en témoigne l’étendue des sujets abordés lors la CIG 2016, mais aussi l’actualité récente (…).
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Ivan Tchotourian
