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…
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…
ITF recommends shareholders vote against ICTSI directors
ITF recommends shareholders vote against ICTSI directorsThe International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) today released a shareholder advisory note detailing governance issues at International Container Terminal Services Inc. (ICTSI). 15/03/2…Read more…
ECJ ruling challenges Ryanair’s employment model
Today saw a highly important by the ECJ relating to low-cost airline Ryanair. As many people will know* Ryanair is anti-union. It also relies on extensive use of indirect employment, with many cabin crew employed by agencies like Crewlink, whilst many …Read more…
Adolf Berle on Sports Direct
Adolf Berle, of Berle and Means fame, continued to write interesting things about corporate power and control long after The Modern Corporation and Private Property. The excerpt below is from Power Without Property: A New Development in American Politi…Read more…
Worker directors via the UK Corporate Governance Code
As anyone who reads this blog will probably be aware, the Conservative government bottled its commitment to put workers on boards. Instead it has asked the FRC to amend the UK Corporate Governance Code to give companies three options, one of which is a…Read more…
A new Left alignment on corporate governance
I can’t overstate how much I like the report that the IPPR has just issued on corporate governance. I’ve been boring on for a while now about what I see as the end of the 1990s model of corporate governance for the UK. At the same time there has been s…Read more…
Pension funds and labour standards
I recently spent quite a bit of time trawling pension fund’s responsible investment policies to see what, if anything, they say about labour issues. The background to this is the long-expressed gripe that investors seem to spend less time looking at th…Read more…
Has UK corporate governance swung to the Left?
Continuing on from the theme of recent posts on workers on boards, despite some of the pushback from expected sources, what is really striking is how much corporate governance policy has shifted towards policies largely articulated by the Left in recen…Read more…
Workers on boards: handle with care
Before I get into the detail of this post I just want to make me thing clear: pension funds’ assets exist to fund pensions for the people that work for organisations – the workers. Those assets were also created by the labour of those workers – it is t…Read more…
Labour, labour and workers on boards
A very quick point about how, in my opinion, Labour should position itself in relation to the question of workers on boards. Obviously it should support the idea, but the issue is how to argue this in public.
In general terms, I would steer clear of t…Read more…
Sky vs Sports Direct
As most people will be aware, last month the non-executive chairman of Sports Direct Keith Hellawell failed to receive the support of a majority of non-insider shareholders (though he received the support of the majority of all shareholders, including …Read more…
Enter, stage right: Workers on boards
“I want to see changes in the way that big business is governed. The people who run big businesses are supposed to be accountable to outsiders, to non-executive directors, who are supposed to ask the difficult questions, think about the long term and defend the interests of shareholders. In…Read more…
Corp gov reform: do something meaningful or don’t bother
I blogged previously about Liam Byrne’s intervention on company law etc. More recently Liz Kendall has written something for Progress that slightly touches on the same turf. There is one sentence of significance for anyone interested in left-of-centre …Read more…
Sports Direct, unions, capitalism and client relations
Sports Direct had its annual general meeting today. Coverage of the AGM has been dominated by criticism of the company’s governance, its remuneration policy and its employment practices. A quick google shows how much criticisms of employment practices …Read more…
Why hasn’t Caledonia Investments disclosed its Tory donations?
A couple of weeks back I blogged that Caledonia Investments had made two separate donations of £2000 to the Conservative Party – received in December 2014 and mid March 2015.
To be crystal clear, according to the Electoral Commission the first donation was received on 12 December 2014, the second…Read more…
Fidelity "steers away from" own previous views?
Just a quick update, as I noted in a previous post Fidelity says it has “deliberately steered away from” addressing the question of scale/size/amount (or as they say “quantum”) of executive pay.
This hasn’t always been their view. It turns out that Fi…Read more…
Employees in corporate governance
I just noticed something rather surprising. There are five political parties that make reference to enhancing the role of employees in corporate governance in their manifestos.
I have done Labour already, so here are the rest.
Lib Dems (page 137 in fu…Read more…