Normes d’encadrement | Page 5

M. Christophe Roux-Duffort propose un billet relayé par le CAS de l’Université Laval sur les « Quatre scénarios pour l’après-COVID-19: les administrateurs à la manœuvre ». Attention : CA, vous avez intérêt à connaître votre direction et à la questionner sur son envie et sa capacité de changer.

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1. Le scénario de la crise-plafond

Le scénario de la crise-plafond illustre bien celui dans lequel la direction se heurte au plafond de verre de la crise sans en apercevoir les sources de renouvellement, et sans envisager de changer quoi que ce soit à ce qui jusqu’avant la crise fonctionnait très bien. Dans ce scénario, la crise confirme l’ordre des choses et il s’agit d’en sortir en rattrapant rapidement le temps perdu pour revenir au statu quo. Ne mésestimez pas cette possibilité. Plus les changements requis par la crise sont importants, plus l’inertie individuelle risque d’être prégnante. C’est le scénario de l’ignorance.

2. Le scénario de la crise-prétexte

Le scénario de la crise-prétexte correspond à celui dans lequel les membres de la direction perçoivent de réels changements à entreprendre en faveur de la transformation de l’organisation sans incarner eux-mêmes les changements nécessaires à ces transformations. Ils se retrouvent en situation de revendiquer le changement de la part de ceux qui pourraient le faire advenir comme le gouvernement, ou même les administrateurs, sans avoir à s’engager eux-mêmes dans une quelconque remise en question. C’est le scénario de l’hypocrisie.

3. Le scénario de la crise-miroir

À la faveur du confinement et des conditions d’introspection qu’il offre, les dirigeants utilisent ce scénario de crise comme un miroir pour identifier leurs limites et les moyens de les dépasser. Ce faisant, ils font des événements un moteur de remise en question et de transformation personnelle. Dans ce scénario cependant, ce renouveau se cantonne à une démarche individuelle qui ne bénéficie pas au reste de l’organisation, parfois par crainte des bouleversements que cela pourrait occasionner. Le changement reste bloqué en quelque sorte à l’échelle de la personne. C’est le scénario du renoncement.

4. Le scénario de la crise-vérité

Ce scénario est identique à celui de la crise-miroir à la différence près que dans ce cas-ci, les dirigeants incarnent en pratique les changements dont ils sont porteurs au sein même de leurs organisations. Ils personnifient le changement qu’ils aimeraient voir se développer. C’est le scénario de la sagesse.

Même si le quatrième scénario apparaît idéal, chacun d’eux contient ses avantages et ses inconvénients et implique de la part des administrateurs un certain doigté pour les accompagner ingénieusement. D’autant qu’à l’intérieur d’un même comité de direction, les personnes pourraient se répartir dans des cas de figure différents les uns des autres.

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Document particulièrement intéressant produit par les ACVM hier !

Pour le consulter : cliquez ici

Bonjour à toutes et à tous, je signale cette intéressante étude : Zetzsche, Dirk Andreas and Anker-Sørensen, Linn and Consiglio, Roberta and Yeboah-Smith, Miko, « The COVID-19-Crisis and Company Law – Towards Virtual Shareholder Meetings », 15 avril 2020, University of Luxembourg Faculty of Law, Economics & Finance, WPS 2020-007.

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Regulators and Parliaments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 epidemic by amending company law. This crisis legislation allows us to examine how, and to what effect, the corporate governance framework can be amended in times of crisis. In fact, almost all leading industrialized nations have already enacted crisis legislation in the field of company law. 

In our recent working paper, ‘The COVID-19-Crisis and Company Law – Towards Virtual Shareholder Meetings’,  we have sought to (1) document the respective crisis legislation; (2) assist countries looking for solutions to respond rapidly and efficiently to the crisis; (3) exchange experiences of crisis measures; and (4) spur academic discussion on the extent to which the crisis legislation can function as a blueprint for general corporate governance reform.

Countries considered in full or in part include Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Readers are encouraged to highlight any inaccuracies in our presentation of the respective laws, and to bring further crisis-related legislation not considered in this working draft to the attention of the authors. Moreover, readers are invited to indicate where there is room for improvement therein, and/or to signal the need for policy reform.

Drawing on the analysis of these more than twenty countries, we note five fields in which legislators have been particularly active. First, the extension of filing periods for annual and quarterly reports to reflect the practical difficulties regarding the collection of numbers and the auditing of financial statements. Second, company law requires shareholders to take decisions in meetings—and these meetings were for the most part in-person gatherings. However, since the gathering of individuals in one location is now at odds with the measures being implemented to contain the virus, legislators have generally allowed for virtual-only meetings, online-only proxy voting and voting-by-mail, and granted relief to various formalities aimed at protecting shareholders (including fixed meeting and notice periods). Third, provisions requiring physical attendance of board members, including provisions on signing corporate documents, have been temporarily lifted for board matters. Fourth, parliaments have enacted changes to allow for more flexible and speedy capital measures, including the disbursement of dividends and the recapitalization of firms, having accepted that the crisis impairs a company’s equity. Fifth and finally, some countries have implemented temporary changes to insolvency law to delay companies’ petitioning for insolvency as a result of the liquidity shock prompted by the imposition of overnight lockdowns.

The legislation passed in response to the COVID-19 crisis provides for an interesting case study through which to examine what can be done to modernize the corporate governance framework with a view to furthering digitalization. Given the difficulties or indeed the impossibility of conducting in-person meetings currently, the overall trajectory of company law reforms has been to allow for digitalization of corporate governance, and ensuring the permissibility of virtual shareholder meetings (VSM), in particular. 

In this respect, it is safe to assume that the rules on VSM will have model character. While the details of the modus operandi of VSM will require careful adjustment, to ensure that shareholders will be afforded the same rights and opportunities to participate as they would at an in-person meeting (including Q&A), the experimental phase during the crisis will feed into the policy discussion, with some more successful and some less successful examples providing food for thought. Yet, it is safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the need for virtual-only shareholder meetings, and that some types of VSM will stay for good long after the current crisis has subsided. 

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Bel article qui amène à réfléchir : Akshaya Kamalnath, « Shareholder Primacy in the Time of Coronavirus », Oxford Business Law Blog, 7 avril 2020.

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It has become fashionable in these troubled times to write about how the coronavirus (or Covid-19) situation shows that the writer’s favourite policies are the best ones. Trite as it may be, I don’t want to miss the opportunity to explain and defend shareholder primacy as a theory / principle followed in corporate law.

Do companies have an ethical obligation to take care of employees during the coronavirus pandemic? If not, why are companies asking employees to work from home and even paying employees when they are not coming in to work? Even companies in the gig economy like Uber are stepping up and offering unexpected support to their drivers whom they have refused to consider as employees. For instance, Uber announced that it would offer 14 days of financial assistance to drivers affected by Covid-19. Similarly, to accommodate the demand from workplaces and educational institutions to switch to working online, tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Zoom have begun offering some of their products’ features for free. Why are they going well beyond what current laws require them to do?

Have they begun to embrace stakeholderism (the idea that companies should service all stakeholders equally) and, if so, can we expect such continued benefits being offered to employees in need even after the pandemic has passed? I’d answer both parts of this question in the negative. In my view, these companies are guided by shareholder primacy (the idea that shareholder interests have primacy over that of other stakeholders).

The first and most obvious reason is that shareholders would want directors of the company they have invested in to step up to the occasion when a crisis as big as a pandemic is staring us in the face. While it is normally assumed that shareholder interests translate into profit-making or wealth maximization, intelligent directors would understand that a crisis calls for a different understanding of what shareholders want. The second possible reason for companies to act in the interests of stakeholders at this time is to enhance their reputation. A company making accommodations during a time of crisis might forego some profits in the short-term but will have reputational gains in the long term. The consideration of reputational incentives is not to suggest that companies acting altruistically should be seen as cynical. On the contrary, it is laudable that the directors of these companies have acted in the interests of the company by taking care of relevant stakeholders when it was most needed. The fact that company reputation was one of the variables in the calculus should be noted positively because that shows that shareholder primacy ensures companies act in the interests of other stakeholders when it is most essential. A third reason is that by offering benefits to employees (or independent contractors as in the case of Uber’s drivers) or customers as in the case of the tech companies, the companies have ensured that the relevant stakeholders (customers and employees / independent contractors) would want to work or continue to work with these companies.

If shareholder primacy leads to beneficial outcomes, why is it so reviled? Shareholder primacy is often confused with a myopic focus on short-term profits. To be sure, the company law of most countries requires directors to act in the best interests of the company and, in determining which interests within the company are to be prioritised, to give primacy to that of shareholders. The default assumption is that most shareholders would want to maximise the wealth that they have invested in the company. However, it is left to directors to consider other relevant interests where they are in the best interests of the company. As I have argued above, it was clearly in the interests of the company to prioritise various stakeholders’ interests and act accordingly, and in this instance they have acted accordingly. Not every situation has such an easy answer and so it is left to directors to choose the course of action best suited to the company, with the interests of shareholders being ultimately prioritised.

What happens after the pandemic has passed? While the coronavirus situation is a big crisis and companies have been stepping up, decisions prioritising the interests of one stakeholder over those of others are routine, even in calmer situations, or where a company alone is facing a crisis of some sort. Take for example, employees’ complaints about toxic work culture and harassment, which we now know was the case with Uber in the past. Often the response is to keep the issue under wraps or refuse to address the particular stakeholder’s needs. This unsavoury behaviour cannot however be attributed to either shareholder primacy or stakeholderism. We would expect that shareholders would want companies to clean their house as soon as they know there is trouble so that they are not at the receiving end of the law suit at a later date and, more importantly, because shareholders would want talented employees to be retained within the company. Unfortunately, the unsavoury behaviour is simply an expression of human nature in some cases and better incentives to prevent such behaviour need to be devised. Similarly, for concerns of other stakeholders, the environment for instance, environment protection and climate change laws would constrain directors’ actions rather than relying on principles of either shareholder primacy or stakeholderism to do the job.

All this is to say that there are problems with how companies are run and we need innovative solutions to create better incentives rather than falling back on paying lip service to stakeholderism as the Business Roundtable recently did in its 2019 statement.

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Par la voie de Me Wahl, le cabinet Norton Rose Fulbright propose un intéressant billet sur les questions juridiques touchant les CA dans le contexte de la pandémie mondiale du Coronavirus : « COVID-19 : Questions juridiques touchant les conseils d’administration canadiens » (11 mars 2020).

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Comment les conseils peuvent-ils s’acquitter de ces devoirs lorsqu’ils relèvent les défis que pose la COVID-19? Il n’y a pas de plan unique qui puisse régler les risques auxquels font face toutes les entreprises. Chaque société, en fonction de la nature de ses activités, subira des conséquences qui lui sont propres attribuables, directement ou indirectement, à la COVID-19. La responsabilité du conseil est de surveiller et suivre ces risques de même que la façon dont la société y répond. Un conseil prudent veillera à ce que : i) la haute direction informe adéquatement le conseil des principaux risques; ii) le conseil comprenne bien ces principaux risques; iii) des conseillers professionnels soient appelés à aider, au besoin et au moment opportun, à cerner, à gérer et à atténuer les risques; iv) un plan de contingence soit élaboré pour différents scénarios envisageables; et v) le conseil suive la mise en œuvre de ses décisions et conseils et fasse preuve de souplesse pour être en mesure de suivre et de répondre à l’évolution de la situation. Aucune liste ne saurait être exhaustive, mais parmi les points pertinents, notons les suivants :

• La santé et sécurité au travail (p. ex. l’hygiène préventive, la gestion des employés ou visiteurs présentant des symptômes, les congés de maladie, la poursuite des activités, la protection des renseignements personnels, les restrictions de voyage et les exigences d’isolement);
• L’interruption de la chaîne d’approvisionnement et les sources de remplacement éventuelles aux fins de l’approvisionnement;
• L’incidence sur le chiffre d’affaires et les mesures à prendre face à une diminution du chiffre d’affaires;
• L’incidence sur les liquidités et les mesures à prendre pour gérer les liquidités;
• La protection d’assurance;
• Les conditions contractuelles clés comme la force majeure et les clauses en cas de changement défavorable important, et la possibilité de négocier des modifications pour les nouveaux contrats à l’avenir;
• L’incidence éventuelle sur la conformité financière pour les entreprises réglementées;
• La pertinence de changer le lieu et la date de l’assemblée des actionnaires et comment le faire;
• Si la tenue d’une assemblée d’actionnaires virtuelle (comme l’assemblée générale annuelle) est souhaitable et permise par la loi;  
• Les obligations d’information et de dépôt prévues par les lois sur les valeurs mobilières, y compris le besoin de changer ou de retirer des prévisions;
• La volatilité des marchés boursiers, qui pourrait favoriser une offre d’achat visant les actions de la société ou faire augmenter l’activisme actionnarial ou, à l’inverse, créer une occasion d’acquisition pour la société.

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