TheCorporateCounsel.net

July 10, 2019

Delaware Chief Justice Strine to Step Down (Ahem, “Retire”)

Two days ago, Delaware Chief Justice Leo Strine announced that he would retire from the bench. This isn’t a surprise. It’s been kind of an open secret in Delaware for the past several months – he didn’t hire clerks for the next term. Leo isn’t quite “retirement age,” so I imagine we will see grander things yet from this very grand lawyer. As noted in this article, there is speculation that Leo will run for governor in Delaware in 2024.

Over on the DealLawyers.com blog yesterday, John gave a nice summary of just how important Leo has been to the Delaware judiciary for the last few decades. And here’s a statement from SEC Chair Clayton…

SEC Approves Nasdaq’s “Liquidity” Proposal

Here’s the intro from this blog by Cooley’s Cydney Posner:

The SEC has approved, on an accelerated basis, the recent Nasdaq proposal (as amended by new amendment no. 3) to revise its initial listing standards to improve liquidity in the market. Prior to the amendments, under the initial listing rules, to list its equity on any Nasdaq tier, a company was required to have a minimum number of publicly held shares, calculated to include restricted securities. Nasdaq proposed, among other things, to revise the initial listing criteria to exclude “restricted securities” from the calculations of a company’s publicly held shares, market value of publicly held shares and round lot holders, given that restricted securities are not freely transferable and are generally illiquid.

To that end, the Nasdaq proposal added new definitions for “restricted securities,” “unrestricted publicly held shares” and “unrestricted securities.” As a result of these changes, only securities that are “freely transferable will be included in the calculation of publicly held shares to determine whether a company satisfies the Exchange’s initial listing criteria under these rules.” No changes were proposed to the continued listing requirements. To allow companies adequate time to complete in-process transactions based on the existing rules, the changes will become effective 30 days after approval (July 5) by the SEC (August 4).

California Reports on Mandatory Women Directors

Here’s the intro from this blog by Allen Matkins’ Keith Bishop:

As noted yesterday, the California Secretary of State published a report on its website concerning publicly domestic or foreign corporations with principal executive offices are located in California. This report was required to document the number of these corporations “who [sic] have at least one female director”. Cal. Corp. Code § 301.3(c). The report, which is in the form of Excel spreadsheets, includes two tables. The first, entitled “SB 826 Corporations By SEC Data”, lists some 537 corporations. The second, entitled “Reporting in Compliance”, lists 184 corporations.

It is hard to know what these tables actually represent. For example, the second table identifies Ball Corporation among the 184 corporations “reporting in compliance”. However, Ball Corporation doesn’t appear on the first list of “SB 826 Corporations By SEC Data”. That isn’t too surprising if one looks at the cover sheet of Ball Corporation’s most recently filed Form 10-K which identifies it as an Indiana corporation with its principal executive offices located in Colorado. As such, it would not be subject to SB 826. That of course begs the question of why it is listed among the compliant and the more philosophical question of whether a corporation that is not subject to the law can be considered compliant.

Broc Romanek