It would be fair to say that the importance of shareholder voting has enjoyed an increasingly higher profile in recent years, not least in response to the financial crisis. Just within the UK investment context, initiatives such as the Myners Principles, the Stewardship Code, the 2006 Companies Act, the Hedge Funds Standards Board Code, UCITS […]
Read MoreA private Member’s Bill was submitted to the Canadian Parliament this week by Robert Oliphant, MP, calling for amendments to the Pensions Benefits Standards Act, 1985, requiring public and private pension plans to disclose considerations given to environmental, social or governance factors during the selection, retention, or liquidation of investments under the plan’s responsibility. The […]
Read MoreDutch Finance Minister Wouter Bos today hit out at shareholders for doing ‘virtually nothing’ to prevent the current financial crisis. Speaking to the International Corporate Governance conference in Amsterdam, Bos used the platform as an opportunity to make a forthright attack on the role of shareholders in the current financial crisis: “The financial crisis is […]
Read MoreNick Hassel in The Times commented earlier this month: “The stock market has been declared dead many times before. We heard this in 1979, in 2003, and are hearing it now in 2009. The consolation is that, on those two previous occasions, the desire to obituarise was just another sign that shares had touched their […]
Read MoreLeading global investors, with assets totalling over $1.3 trillion, have written to US President Barack Obama urging the new administration to implement “critical” legal reforms to US financial markets and corporate governance practices. The institutions, representing the pension savings of some 15 million individuals globally, called for fundamental reforms as a means of restoring investor […]
Read MoreAs the Treasury Select Committee (TSC) hearings rumble on, professional investors have been under close scrutiny. Had Alistair Darling had the foresight to tax the word ‘responsibility’, he could probably have recouped a large slice of the unprecedented sums the public purse is currently spending. Investor responsibility raises two very simple and potentially conflicting questions. […]
Read More