Founded in 1969, NIRI is the professional association of corporate officers and investor relations consultants responsible for communication among corporate management, shareholders, securities analysts and other financial community constituents. The largest professional investor relations association in the world, NIRI’s more than 3,500 members represent 2,000 publicly held companies and $5.4 trillion in stock market capitalization.
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As we enter the second week of March, a Senate Banking Committee financial reform bill (that will include corporate governance reforms) continues to be negotiated by Democrats and Republicans without agreement. Dodd first released a draft of a very aggressive bill that was doomed for failure in November and then immediately started bi-partisan discussions to reach a compromise position. For the last several weeks, I have been suggesting that a bill should be released soon. The delay and area of disagreement is on the CFPA or a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. So we continue to wait and watch as I expect a bipartisan bill to be more favorable for corporate governance reform. So, I am happy to wait. This past week's big news was that sales of RiskMetrics to MCSI. MCSI is known as a financial index and investment services firm. In a recent call to discuss the purchase, MCSI indicated they expected cost savings from consolidation of operations and while the ISS proxy advisory portion is a “non-core" business, it is expected to generate cash to help MCSI pay down debt. I can't help but wonder whether this means fees will increase or ISS will be sold off. To that end, NIRI and the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals have completed a white paper outlining some of the conflicts and problems with proxy advisory firms. I shared the major points with you a couple weeks ago and I will share this discussion paper with you next week, as this is an area NIRI is advocating for change. Since things at the SEC were slow this past week, I thought I would share with you some of the enforcement cases the SEC brought this past week. The one that stood out was against a psychic for fraud as he touted his ability to predict the stock market. I find it sad that he was able to get $6 million dollars from than 100 investors. As many of my twitter friends said "he should have seen it coming!" Other enforcement actions this week included:
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