…“What you want from directors is for them to really push the CEO for answers and, just by human nature, that gets harder the longer they’re on a board,” says GMI founder Nell Minow. “For every argument you can make about continuity and depth of understanding, you can argue that entrenched boards make companies sclerotic [...]
CommonWealth REIT Resurrects a Fallen Director
By Kyle Whisler, Takeover Defense Analyst At its annual meeting of shareholders last week, the board of CommonWealth REIT (NYSE: CWH) sank to a new low, explicitly demonstrating that the company has little interest in the rights of their shareholders. For the past few months, the company has been involved in a tumultuous takeover fight [...]
The Guardian: Board diversity: can voluntary change succeed?
by Kimberly Gladman and Michelle Lamb A ‘women only’ carriage in Japan, which has the worst record for board diversity of any industrialised country. Photograph: Junko Kimura/Getty Images Many studies in the United States and in Europe have documented the benefits of board diversity for corporate performance. Most public companies’ nominating committees, however, don’t seem [...]
Event Alerts for Responsible Investors, 5.17.2013
In this week’s Event Alerts for Responsible Investors, we included 27 companies whose ESG and accounting risk profiles have been affected by recent events. Download the full Event Summary. Companies Environmental Social Governance Accounting Republic Services, Inc. (NYSE:RSG) Associated British Foods plc (LON:ABF); H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB (STO:HM B); Inditex SA (MCE:ITX); PVH Corp (NYSE:PVH); [...]
The Future of Fraud Detection
By Lev Janashvili Fundamental investment analysis typically assumes the reliability of corporate financial reports. But a growing body of empirical research characterizes this assumption as dangerously naïve, especially for investment portfolios pegged to broad market indices. In How Pervasive is Corporate Fraud? (February 22, 2013), researchers at the University of Toronto and University of Chicago [...]
Nell Minow: Four issues that test board responsiveness
GMI Ratings founder Nell Minow discusses four areas she expects investors to pressure corporate boards for change through the end of this year.
The State of Corporate Governance: Drone Corporations
Robert AG Monks, Founder, and Ric Marshall, Chief Analyst, GMI Ratings Presented on May 14, 2013 at GMI Ratings seminar New Frontiers in Risk Modeling: ESG and Forensic Accounting
After Enron: The Fingerprints of Fraud
James A. Kaplan, Vice Chairman and Founder, GMI Ratings Presented on May 14, 2013 at GMI Ratings seminar New Frontiers in Risk Modeling: ESG and Forensic Accounting
The AGR Anomaly: Governance and the Mispricing of U.S. Stocks
Dr. Walter Torous, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management Presented on May 14, 2013 at GMI Ratings seminar New Frontiers in Risk Modeling: ESG and Forensic Accounting
Forbes: ‘Carl Icahn Deserves The Nobel Prize’
According to my old friend Robert A.G. Monks — at 80 years of age still the sharpest thinking corporate governance guru in the world– Carl Icahn, the 77 year old summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University (the wealthiest man on Wall Street), should get the Nobel for leading America’s hedge fund community to the [...]
Event Alerts for Responsible Investors
In this week’s Event Alerts for Responsible Investors, we included 22 companies whose ESG and accounting risk profiles have been affected by recent events. Download the full event summary. Companies Environmental Social Governance Accounting PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG) Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (ETR:BMW) JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) Anglo American Platinum Ltd (JNB:AMS) Enbridge Inc (TSE:ENB) adidas AG (ETR:ADS - US Listed) EPL Oil [...]
Corporate Counsel: Tracking Changes in Women’s Corporate Roles
…If GMI Ratings’ annual global study of women presence on boards identified a teeny bit of progress last year, then this year’s survey charts just a teeny bit more. The bottom line: “The survey finds extremely slow progress, largely due to countries without legal mandates for the representation of women on corporate boards,” according to [...]
The Wall Street Journal: Splitting Top Posts Doesn’t Always Work Magic
…GMI Ratings, a corporate-governance research firm, looked at the impact of splitting the top jobs on shareholder returns and other considerations in a study published last June. The research found total shareholder return at companies where CEO and chairman posts were combined outperformed those where the positions had been separated after one year (returns of [...]
Berlusconi Casts Shadow Over New Government
By Stefan Borghi, Research Analyst On April 27, two months after initial elections, Italy finally formed a new government, ending a long political stalemate that threatened to deepen the country’s financial woes. The new government is a coalition formed by new Prime Minister Enrico Letta, which unites Letta’s center-left Democratic Party with Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right [...]
Quantifying what is qualitative and vice versa
This interview with GMI Ratings’ Ric Marshall was recorded during ESG Europe 2012 conference, held in Amsterdam, October 2012, organized by the Responsible Investor. “Quantifying what is qualitative and vice versa”, fsinsight.org, May 6, 2013.
The Cost of a False Freedom
By Lev Janashvili A Review of Citizens DisUnited by Robert AG Monks It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone if the typical reader of the financial press has formed the impression that we as a culture have essentially done what we needed to do about corporate governance. We used to ignore it, now we talk about it. [...]