Valeur actionnariale vs. sociétale | Page 32

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.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, une décision de la Cour suprême américaine (Cour suprême du Delaware, C&J Energy Services, Inc. v. City of Miami General Employees’ and Sanitation Employees’ Retirement Trust, 19 décembre 2014) est venue clarifier les devoirs des administrateurs lorsque se produit un changement de contrôle. La doctrine Revlon est revisité !

Pour en savoir plus, vous pouvez vous rendre au lien suivant (ici) qui vous emmènera sur le site du cabinet Stikeman Elliott et le mise à jour de Benoît Dubord et Stéphane Rousseau.

Dans l’affaire C&J Energy Services, Inc. v. City of Miami General Employees’ and Sanitation Employees’ Retirement Trust, la Cour suprême du Delaware a infirmé le jugement de la Cour de chancellerie qui interdisait la tenue d’un vote des actionnaires sur une fusion pendant 30 jours et imposait une période de sollicitation d’offres d’achat dans ce délai. La décision de la Cour suprême, rendue en décembre 2014, réexamine les devoirs Revlon trente ans après le prononcé du célèbre jugement et offre des précisions importantes sur le cheminement que doit suivre un conseil pour remplir ses obligations fiduciaires à l’occasion d’un changement de contrôle.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Intéressant article publié en 2013 par le professeur Pierre-Henri Conac « Director’s Duties in Groups of Companies – Legalizing the Interest of the Group at the European Level » (European Company and Financial Law Review, 2013, Vol. 10, no 2, pp. 194-226). D’accord avec Pierre-Henri Conac ?

The Action Plan of the European Commission of December 2012 on “European company law and corporate governance – a modern legal framework for more engaged shareholders and sustainable companies” mentioned that “the Commission will, in 2014, come with an initiative to improve both the information available on groups and recognition of the concept of ‘group interest’.” The origin of this renewed interest by the European Commission can be found in the report of the Reflection Group on the Future of EU Company Law of 2011. Recognising the interest of the group at the European level would provide many advantages, especially for groups having cross-border activities in the European Union, whether led by a large parent company or a Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME). In addition, recognition of the interest of the group has become Ius Commune in Europe. However, there is a need to proceed cautiously. Therefore, a recommendation would be the most attractive legal instrument. Any action at the European level should also take into consideration the distinction between wholly-owned and non-wholly-owned subsidiaries. In the case of the latter, specific instruments of protection of minority shareholders should be left to the Member State to develop.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian

Voilà une belle OPA qui est en cours… encore faut-il qu’elle réussise ! La société canadienne a tenté à nouveau de séduire K&S. La responsabilité sociétale n’est pas tout à fait éloignée du débat comme en témoigne cette déclaration de K&S : « the transaction proposed by PotashCorp puts jobs at risk and that sites and raw material production in Germany might not be maintained ».

K&S, the German potash and salt mining company that owns Morton Salt, said on Friday that the Potash Corporation had made another unsolicited takeover approach for the company. The latest offer, which came in a letter to K&S’s board of directors and management, was unchanged in its value, but included a more formal “business combination agreement,” K&S said in a news release on Friday. Norbert Steiner, the K&S chief executive, said that the proposed priced “does not at all reflect the fundamental value of K&S” and wasn’t in the company’s best interest. The takeover approach valued K&S at 7.8 billion euros, or about $8.5 billion.

Pour en savoir plus, cliquez ici.

À la prochaine…

Ivan Tchotourian