Pom Shorts

ATTORNEY: H. ADAM PRUSSIN
POMERANTZ MONITOR, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014   

PENSION PLANS SEEK RIGHT TO NOMINATE DIRECTORS. 
A band of institutional shareholders is mounting the first push ever at 75 United States companies to allow investors to hire and fire directors directly. Leading the drive is Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, who oversees five municipal public pension funds with $160 billion in assets. He announced that his office will submit a proposal to each of the 75 companies, asking the company to adopt a bylaw allowing shareholders who have owned at least 3% of its stock for three years or more to nominate directors for election to the board. Among those 75 companies are eBay, Exxon Mobil, Monster Beverage and Priceline. State pension plans in California, Connecticut, Illinois and North Carolina are reportedly also supportive of these efforts. 

So far this year, shareholder activists had a success rate of 72 percent in proxy fights, up from 60 percent in 2013, according to FactSet SharkRepellent, a research firm. Notably: 

STARBOARD VALUE LP WON ALL 12 DIRECTOR SEATS AT OLIVE GARDEN. 
In our last issue we discussed the proxy battle launched by Starboard to win control over the board of Darden Restaurants, which owns the Olive Garden chain. Both of the top proxy advisory firms, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, recommended that investors vote for all 12 of Starboard’s nominees -- and that’s exactly what they did, ousting the entire incumbent board. Rest assured, Olive Garden will be salting its pasta from here on out. 

BIG BANKS PAY BILLIONS MORE IN FINES, AS NEW INVESTIGATIONS ARE LAUNCHED INTO OTHER MISCONDUCT. 
So what else is new? It seems like every issue of the Monitor contains news of another multi-billion-dollar settlement of government claims of wrongdoing by our ne’er-do-well banks, and this issue is no exception. This time Citibank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC Bank and UBS have agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle claims involving foreign currency transactions. Their currency traders allegedly attempted to manipulate benchmark rates known as the World Markets/Reuters Closing Spot Rates, the most widely referenced benchmark, which is used to establish relative values of different foreign currencies. Often they used information about imminent trades by their own customers to trade ahead of them and reap profits at their expense. The government is reportedly also considering criminal prosecutions against individual traders. 

No sooner were the settlements announced than we heard news that government agencies are investigating various banks, once again including JPMorgan Chase, for trying to collect on loans that have been discharged in bankruptcy. The banks allegedly tried to coerce borrowers to pay those discharged loans by continuing to report the loans to credit reporting agencies as if they were still in default.