Member Article

What's going up, what's going down

The FSA agreed as part of a market abuse case that, ?wall crossing? can legitimately entail the provision of inside information to a third party. The telephone transcript released by the FSA makes interesting reading, not least being Greenlight?s views on first the role of investment banks, ?I wouldn?t allow myself to get browbeaten by convertible bond holders or excuse me Merrill Lynch investment bankers?. Secondly, corporate governance, ?you guys are the managers, you guys are in charge of the Company, we?re shareholders and we prefer to be passive shareholders and not run the company. If we wanted to run the company we should be doing something different. We want to run our company, not your company?.

In this statement you can see the makings of a straightforward Corporate Governance Code, perhaps along the following lines, ?Run your Company as if it were our Company?.

On the plus side was a report published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development involving the role of employees in the bid for Charter International plc by Colfax. Since September 2010 UK Takeover Rules permit employees to circulate their views on a proposed takeover.

Charter International undertook a month long employee consultation which resulted in a nine page document summarising their views on the merits of the Colefax bid.

Feed-back from those involved was that consultation reinforced the relationship between Charter International and its employees. Management was strengthened with the benefit of this open due diligence and employee input.

So a good day for open consultation, a bad day for confidential consultations by telephone.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tim Stocks .