TheCorporateCounsel.net

June 16, 2010

Let Her Rip: Conference Committee Debates Investor Protection & Executive Compensation Provisions Today!

Yesterday, I blogged about the progress of the House-Senate conference committee deliberations and the release of the “Conference Base Text.” Later on, Rep. Barney Frank issued this press release stating that debate over the investor protection and executive compensation provisions will begin at 11 am today.

The press release contains a long list of changes to the base text that the House Democrats seek. As noted in the ISS Blog, among other changes sought by these House Democrats are these:

– Require separate shareholder votes on “golden parachute” retirement payouts when companies seek approval for mergers, consolidations, or other transactions. This provision was in the House bill, but not the Senate measure.

– Add a House provision on enhanced compensation oversight for the financial industry. The House members seek to require “all federal financial regulators to issue and enforce joint compensation rules specifically applicable to all financial institutions with a federal regulator.”

– Add a House provision that SEC apply independence standards to compensation committee consultants that are competitively neutral and treat large and small consultants equally.

– Add a House provision to direct the SEC to require large institutional investment managers (i.e., those subject to Section 13(f) requirements) to disclose their proxy voting on advisory votes and golden parachute matters.

This Washington Post article describes how the rare “made-for-TV” reconciliation process feels like…

Conference Committee Reconciliation: Rating Agency Overhaul Bites the Dust (For Now)

As noted in this WSJ article, yesterday’s House-Senate conference committee negotiations resulted in the removal of new conflict-of-interest rules for credit rating agencies from the reform bill. The conferees agreed that something needs to be done to reform the rating agency process – but thought it was too complicated to tackle in this bill. So in essence, the reform was tabled for now – with a promise that something would be done later as noted in this NY Times article.

The Latest Compensation Disclosures: A Proxy Season Post-Mortem

Always a popular program, tune in tomorrow for the CompensationStandards.com webcast – “The Latest Compensation Disclosures: A Proxy Season Post-Mortem” – to hear Mark Borges of Compensia, Dave Lynn of CompensationStandards.com and Morrison & Foerster and Ron Mueller of Gibson Dunn analyze what was disclosed (and what was not disclosed) during the proxy season.

If you’re not yet a member of CompensationStandards.com, try our “Rest of ’10 for Half Price” No-Risk Trial to catch this program.

– Broc Romanek