In the last 10 years, the Equator Principles or EPs have emerged as the industry standard for financial institutions to assess social and environmental risk in the project finance market. The EPs – which are based on the International Finance Corporation or IFC’s performance standards on social and environmental sustainability and the World Bank’s environmental, health and safety guidelines – have significantly increased attention on social/community responsibility, including as related to indigenous peoples, labour standards, and consultation with locally affected communities. They have also promoted convergence in the market: at present, 79 financial institutions in 32 countries have officially adopted the EPs, reportedly covering over 70% of international project finance debt in emerging markets.

This month saw the approval of the third version of the EPs, or EP III, completing a consultation process that was launched in July 2011. EP III will be effective from 4 June 2013 and financial institutions that are signatories to the EP, called EPFIs, will need to apply EP III to all new transactions by 1 January 2014.

…continue reading: Equator Principles III Enters Into Force This June

This is a primer on attorneys as award-seeking SEC whistleblowers. It digests the relevant law and explains how it applies in real situations. That law includes the SEC attorney conduct and whistleblower award rules and each state’s ethics rules applicable to attorney disclosure. Fully assessing a particular situation will often require referring to the relevant rules for each state that might come into play for a particular lawyer in a particular situation. We therefore include information about choice of law and a chart summarizing the relevant rules in each of 51 US jurisdictions.

Our hope is that with this primer close at hand, attorneys and companies will not only be equipped to spot issues and apply the law, but will also understand how limited the circumstances are that will allow a lawyer to disclose confidential information to the SEC without client consent and seek a monetary award. This is true even though the SEC has expanded the circumstances allowing disclosure beyond those recognized in many states.

We will end with steps companies can take to deal with risks related to attorneys who are actual or would-be whistleblowers.

…continue reading: Can Attorneys Be Award-Seeking SEC Whistleblowers?

Researchers and business leaders have long decried short-termism: the excessive focus of executives of publicly traded companies—along with fund managers and other investors—on short-term results. The central concern is that short-termism discourages long-term investments, threatening the performance of both individual firms and the U.S. economy.

In the paper, How Short-Termism Invites Corruption…and What To Do About It, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I argue that short-termism also invites institutional corruption—that is, institutionally supported behavior that, while not necessarily unlawful, erodes public trust and undermines a company’s legitimate processes, core values, and capacity to achieve espoused goals. Institutional corruption in business typically entails gaming society’s laws and regulations, tolerating conflicts of interest, and persistently violating accepted norms of fairness, among other things.

…continue reading: Short-Termism at Its Worst

A recent FINRA disciplinary action sends a strong message to broker-dealers that the development of their compliance systems—particularly with respect to email review and retention—must keep pace with the growth of their businesses.

FINRA fined LPL Financial LLC (LPL) $7.5 million for significant failures in its email system that prevented LPL from accessing hundreds of millions of emails, and from reviewing tens of millions of other emails over an approximately six-year period. FINRA stressed that LPL’s inadequate systems and procedures caused the firm to provide incomplete responses to email requests from regulators, and also likely affected the firm’s production of emails in arbitrations and private actions. Accordingly, FINRA also required the firm to establish a $1.5 million fund to pay discovery sanctions to customer claimants that were potentially affected by the system failures, and to notify regulators that may have received incomplete email production.

…continue reading: FINRA: Broker-Dealer Email Systems Must Keep Pace with Firm Growth

After the horrifying collapse of a factory in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 workers, companies like H&M are moving to strengthen supplier standards and audits, as they should. We have seen similar responses to other compliance meltdowns in the past. Banks trumpet new checks and balances to help prevent excessive risk taking, massive trading losses and robo-foreclosures. Walmart points to changes in its compliance policies in response to front-page allegations of bribery and corruption in Mexico. Companies are quite happy to tell investors, employees, and the public how such changes will prevent the same problems from recurring.

This public disclosure about change for the future is commendable. But such reforms must be accompanied by measures to hold executives accountable for major compliance failures in the past. And here, beyond the occasional news report that a CEO volunteered to forego a bonus, companies tell us very little.

…continue reading: Demanding Transparency in Clawbacks

Corporate Counsel recently ran an article entitled “Bringing Compliance to the C-Suite,” based on a Rand Corporation conference of a similar name and previewing a subsequent report-out. The focus of the conference, as reflected in papers presented there and referenced in the article, is that a variety of pressures cause CEOs to act badly or, at the least, to be indifferent to issues of corporate integrity. This is, of course, an important perspective.

But, despite the headlines, many CEOs, supported by boards of directors and top company leaders, are trying to do the right thing. Indeed, how a corporation fuses high performance with integrity—from the CEO to the shop or trading floor—is a venerable topic. And, despite important roles for the board and top company leaders like finance, legal, compliance, and HR officers, the profound reality, in my view, is that only the right CEO can create a robust culture of integrity.

Given the often-dour public perception of CEOs and given the contrasting reality of their centrality in a company’s fusion of performance with integrity, I thought it worth re-emphasizing core principles of private-ordering that can serve as practical ideals for CEOs and for companies seeking to do the right thing. These core principles should be kept in view as various discrete problems about aberrant CEO behavior are discussed in venues like the Rand conference, and it is helpful to think of them as arising in two dimensions of corporate governance.

…continue reading: Only the Right CEO Can Create a Culture of Integrity

A recent inquiry into potential insider trading in Switzerland ahead of the acquisition of H.J. Heinz Company has drawn attention to the role of U.S. regulators in policing suspicious trading activities that take place outside of the United States. While the Heinz matter has attracted significant media attention, it is only the latest in a string of similar cross-border inquiries and enforcement actions undertaken recently by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As these matters demonstrate, the SEC has in recent years shown an increasing willingness to pursue insider trading enforcement actions with substantial international dimensions. In the words of former SEC Enforcement Chief Robert Khuzami, “offshore trading is not off-limits to U.S. law enforcement.”

Historically, many of the SEC’s insider trading cases with international angles were simply the outgrowth of cases that were primarily domestic in nature. In recent years, however, a number of the SEC’s insider trading matters have involved significant overseas conduct (e.g., foreign traders operating through foreign accounts) and consequently a high number of foreign defendants. In many of these matters, the jurisdictional nexus between the suspicious conduct and the U.S. market is increasingly attenuated (including at least one recent example in which the sole basis appears to have been that a particular securities transaction was cleared through a U.S. brokerage account). While individuals or firms who choose to litigate insider trading cases against the SEC may be able to raise defenses to the SEC’s arguably extraterritorial exercise of its jurisdiction under certain factual scenarios, the mere prospect of an SEC investigation – including significant legal costs and corresponding reputational impact – should cause internationally active firms to take note of the breadth and intensity of the SEC’s focus on cross-border insider trading matters.

…continue reading: U.S. Insider Trading Enforcement Goes Global

Companies commonly supplement their reported earnings under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) with non-GAAP financial measures that they believe more accurately reflect their results of operations or financial position or that are commonly used by investors to evaluate performance. A non-GAAP financial measure is a numerical measure of a company’s historical or future financial performance, financial position or cash flows that includes or excludes amounts from the most directly comparable GAAP measure. Non-GAAP financial measures are used by companies to bridge the divide between corporate reporting that is standardized under GAAP and reporting that is tailored to a particular industry or circumstance.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) permits companies to present non-GAAP financial measures in their public disclosures as well as registration statements filed under the Securities Act of 1933 (Securities Act) and periodic reports filed under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act), subject to compliance with Regulation G and Item 10(e) of Regulation S-K (Item 10(e)). These regulations were adopted to ensure that investors are provided with financial information that is fulsome and not misleading.

…continue reading: Disclosure of Non-GAAP Financial Measures

There are two main sources of confusion in the public corporate governance debate. One is the confusion about the role of public policy in corporate governance. The other is a lack of empirical knowledge among commentators about the corporate landscape and the way that today’s stock markets influence the conditions for exercising long term and value creating corporate governance. This paper tries to mitigate some of this confusion and to increase awareness in both respects.

In terms of public policy it is important to understand that the general corporate governance discussion usually takes place on two different levels. And both are legitimate. One is concerned with the everyday workings of individual companies: how they organize their internal procedures, staff their company organs and build their corporate culture. Much of this is unique to the company in question. The choices to be made are often a matter of business judgment and are seldom in a domain where policy makers and regulators have any specific expertise.

…continue reading: Who Cares? Corporate Governance in Today’s Equity Markets

On April 22, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced its first non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with a company in a matter involving alleged violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). [1] The SEC entered into the agreement with Ralph Lauren Corporation (Lauren), resolving allegations that Lauren violated the FCPA when its Argentine subsidiary allegedly paid bribes to government and customs officials to improperly secure the importation of Lauren’s products into Argentina. The NPA in this case resulted from Lauren’s prompt self-reporting and extensive cooperation. Prior to the Lauren NPA, the SEC seemed to provide limited credit to public companies for cooperation in FCPA investigations.
Time will tell whether the Lauren NPA is a harbinger of a new approach.

…continue reading: SEC Announces First Non-Prosecution Agreement in an FCPA Matter