From the category archives:

Shareholders

Outrage of the Week: Alice in Boardland and Other Fairy Tales About Lehman Brothers

April 23, 2010

Leonard Lance, (R.NJ): Mr. Cruikshank, to follow up in your remarks.   Do you believe there were corporate governance failures at Lehman? Thomas Cruikshank, Chairman, Lehman board auit committee: No, I don’t. I think our governance procedures were really very, very good. House Committee on Financial Services, April 20, 2010 A number of revealing facts emerged from [...]

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Bank of America and the Inexorable Laws of Physics

April 30, 2009

The decision of a majority of shareholders at Bank of America to oppose the board and separate the positions of CEO and chair, appointing an independent director to the latter position, is one for the books.  This is the biggest institution in the history of business where shareholders have brought about such a dramatic change [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Harsh is the Tether That Does Not Bind When Shareholders Face Say on Pay

May 22, 2008

Owners of American corporations have rarely spearheaded the kind of landmark reforms the capital markets have needed to ensure public confidence or avoid the club of government regulation. They are reprising their Laodicean roles by failing to force a say on executive compensation. More than a decade ago, we described the growing trend of inflated [...]

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Outrage of the Week: Leadership Fiddles While Bear Stearns Burns

March 14, 2008

With absentee leaders like Jimmy Cayne at the top and a corporate governance culture straight out of the 1920s, the surprise is not that Bear Stearns fell into a confidence chasm. The surprise is that calamity did not strike earlier. When the subprime meltdown was already giving a chilling preview of coming attractions last summer [...]

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Outrage of the Week: When Subprime CEOs Dissemble Before Congress

March 9, 2008

Never in modern business has so much been given to so few for such colossally failed results. In just five years, these three CEOs made more than $460 million while leading their companies into the greatest losses in their history. One of them, Charles O. Prince of Citigroup, even got a bonus of $10 million, [...]

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The Black Touch

December 5, 2007

The same Napoleonic scale of misjudgments and miscalculations that have dogged his business decisions are now inexorably shaping Conrad Black’s legal destiny. It is one thing not to show remorse for the crimes of which one has been convicted; it is quite another to wear them as a badge of honor while striding into the [...]

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The Elephant The Globe and Mail Missed

November 28, 2007

Research In Motion holds the distinction of being Canada’s top company in terms of market capitalization. Its boardroom governance practices fall considerably short of that mark. It is a seismic shift in Canada’s corporate governance landscape that appears to have passed The Globe and Mail by without causing a ripple. The Globe and Mail’s Report [...]

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Cisco Restocks

November 19, 2007

The Cisco move is just the latest example of companies that put too much time and creativity into dreaming up elaborate financial schemes —schemes which, by some remarkable consistency of nature, always wind up adding to the CEO’s pay package. I am not a big fan of company stock repurchasing. While I am the first [...]

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Countrywide Posts Record Loss After CEO Cashes In

October 26, 2007

Earlier in October we commented on Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo’s accelerated sale of shares gained from a generous stock options program. We thought the timing was interesting and noted:

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