Tomorrow will see the introduction of regulations that will make it mandatory for larger listed companied to disclose the ratio between chief executive salaries and the average pay for employees of the same firm. Although the UK has actually been beate…Read more…
Keep your nose out of executive pay!
This is from the concluding paragraph of a recent academic paper on executive pay:
While the pay controversies fueling calls for regulation have touched on legitimate issues concerning executive compensation, the most vocal critics of …Read more…
Ryanair: ownership and control
Ryanair’s latest results are out today. Aside from the update on negotiations on unions, which I won’t comment on…, the bit that caught my eye is the commentary on Brexit and the potential knock-on impact on Ryanair’s shareholders:
We remain concerne…Read more…
Carillion: shareholder primacy plus shareholder inaction
As most people will be aware, the Work and Pensions and BEIS committee have published their joint report on the Carillion collapse today. I won’t bother rehashing much better summaries of what it says that you can read elsewhere, rather I want to focus…Read more…
Lynn Stout and shareholder capitalism
Lynn Stout, one of the most interesting thinkers/writers on corporate governance, sadly died recently at the ridiculously early age of 60. She was definitely someone who has had an influence on my thinking, and I strongly recommend her books (which are…Read more…
Exec pay, again
Two bits in the FT caught my eye recently, and I think both are indicative of why executive pay will continue to cause fuel the public’s belief that corporate boards are making out like bandits and there needs to radical action to tackle it.
First is …Read more…
Apollo backs away from FirstGroup
A few weeks back, FirstGroup’s share price went on a mysterious upwards journey. Then, a few days later, it was revealed that FirstGroup had rebuffed an approach from US-listed private equity mob Apollo.
Almost immediately it became clear that, aside …Read more…
Derivatives, influence, tax, policy etc
One of the things that was left hanging after the Melrose/GKN bid was the nature of the relationship between hedge funds and similar investors and their counter parties, and how this plays out during bid situations.
When I watched Greg Clark defending…Read more…
Persimmon result tells a lot about shareholders and executive pay
As you may have noted, there was a rather large vote against Persimmon’s remuneration report earlier in the week. This was in response to a £75m award to the chief executive, reduced from the original £110m.
First things first – the pay award was the …Read more…
Unite calls for tougher takeover laws as GKN bid gets government go-ahead
Unite calls for tougher takeover laws as GKN bid gets government go-ahead24 April 2018The whims of short-term speculators and hedge funds will ‘drive a coach and horses’ through the UK’s industrial strategy unless the government toughens up the UK’s ta…Read more…
Merger arbitrage in practice: Sand Grove Capital
Given the renewed interest in financial market activity around mergers and acquisitions, I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the regulatory disclosures for one of the funds that has caught my eye lately.
I hadn’t heard of Sand Grove Ca…Read more…
No, Elliott is not Whitbread’s largest shareholder
With the Melrose bid for GKN almost complete, our old friends Elliott are back in the news again, this time targeting Whitbread, where it looks like they will be pushing for Costa to be spun off. Cue lots of headlines, many of them identifying Elliott’…Read more…
ISS and US pension funds vote against ICTSI directors
Proxy advisors and shareholders endorse voting against non-independent ICTSI Directors in line with ITF recommendationsGlobal proxy advisors and shareholders have recommended voting against the re-election of non-independent Directors of Filipino port …Read more…
IEA report on GKN/Melrose / old Takeover Panel comments
The Institute of Economic Affairs has stuck a report out today on the Melrose bid for GKN. Very broadly it says that there is nothing to get worked up about. Most importantly, a headline message is “leave it to the shareholders”
Interestingly, the rep…Read more…
Wolfgang Streeck
Belated realised that I never blogged about How Will Capitalism End by Wolfgang Streeck, which I read some time last year. There are loads of interesting ideas in there, even if don’t agree with some of it. Anyway, here’s a little excerpt from the intr…Read more…
Some reasons centrists continue to fail
Simon Wren-Lewis has a good blog up on Social Europe on the mistakes that centrists make. I’ve been thinking along similar lines, albeit with the aid of other people…!
1. Centrism is failing because is attacking its opponents morally rather than pol…Read more…
Just a bit more on GKN
Here are a couple of things I noticed over the past few days. Anyone sharing my interest in this should have a read of John Collingridge’s great piece looking at the end of the bid process. There are some really interesting nuggets in there.
For examp…Read more…
GKN takeover – losing the battle, winning the war
Few things have made me as angry recently as the Melrose takeover bid for GKN. This bid was opposed by a very wide group – workers, unions, GKN customers, Labour, some Tories, the Daily Mail, most of the large long-term GKN shareholders – yet it got ov…Read more…
Elliott’s support for Melrose shows why GKN must not be taken over
Yesterday afternoon, Elliott Advisers announced that it plans to support the Melrose bid for GKN. This was duly reported, without much scrutiny, as support for Melrose from GKN’s second largest shareholder.
Actually it’s more complicated than that. In…Read more…
Melrose / GKN bid – is the hedge fund long/short trade unwinding?
As you’ll have noticed, I’ve been following the Melrose bid for GKN with interest. In particular I’ve been looking at hedge fund activity around the bid, and the short Melrose / long GKN arbitrage trade. As I’ve blogged previously, one of the key playe…Read more…