Vince Cable, the UK’s Secretary of State for Business used the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference to launch an an investigation into possible failures of market and corporate governance which have discouraged a long-term approach to investment.  The paper, …

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The UK’s M&A regulator, The Takeover Panel has concluded that the regime for hostile bids needs revision. Calls for a radical overhaul of the British approach to takeovers were made following the heated Kraft/Cadbury deal earlier this year.
The Panel
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While the Securities & Exchange Commission is busy with its implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, business lobby groups are attempting to derail attempts to give the owners of US corporations similar rights to those …

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Just as the governance community is beginning to feel it might explode if another consultation comes its way, the battle for regulatory attention over the parlous state of the proxy system is hotting up in the US.

Computershare, the global …

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The debate around comply or explain as a concept took an interesting turn last week when three of the UK’s largest pension fund investors publicly broke ranks on the issue of annual director elections. In a letter published in the …

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Fair corporate suffrage is an important right that should attach to every equity security
Source: United States Congress, 1934

There’s no small irony that the first shareholder voting regulations were introduced in the aftermath of ‘The Great Crash’. Now, another

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Investment bank Mediobanca is said to have reached a unanimous agreement on the Assicurazioni Generali board list which will include a new chairman for Europe’s third biggest insurer.

Generali is, as the FT puts it “arguably Italy’s most important financial …

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Mary Schapiro, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission is a step closer to straightening out America’s proxy plumbing. In a speech made at the Stanford University Law School Directors College on June 20th, Schapiro outlined the Commission’s current thinking.…

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As elected representatives in the US enter the final stages of merging the two competing financial services reform bills, investors are becoming increasingly anxious that their key reform proposal, access to the proxy, will be rendered useless.

From the outset, …

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As Western economies tie themselves in knots trying to protect financial markets from future harm and arguing about what role governance plays in that process, commentators have been struggling to define governance and who should be responsible for it. We …

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