A dangerous precedent from the SEC, in opposition to academic freedom

Just this week, Commissioner Daniel M. Gallagher and former Commissioner Joseph A. Grundfest issued a draft of a paper that takes on the Harvard Shareholder Rights Project.  The Harvard SRP describes itself as “a clinical program operating at Harvard Law School and directed by Professor Lucian Bebchuk.”  From 2012 through 2014, the Harvard SRP focused on proposing precatory shareholder resolutions under Rule 14a-8 seeking the elimination of staggered boards.  It claims that 121 companies receiving these proposals “have agreed to move toward annual elections following the submission of board declassification proposals for 2012, 2013 and/or 2014 meetings.”

The Commissioners take issue with the Harvard SRP’s reliance on academic research finding that staggered boards are inimical to shareholder interests.  They note that the Harvard SRP omits the larger body of academic research that contradicts the research relied upon by the Harvard SRP.  They claim not to take sides in the debate over the merits of board classification, but they do conclude:

  • The Harvard SRP proposal could be described as materially false and misleading because it omits the contradictory research…

There is more to the story, but that is already enough to make me nervous.  Here is Matt Levine on the same:

Here is an utterly loony paper by Securities Exchange Commissioner Daniel Gallagher and former SEC commissioner Joseph Grundfest arguing that Harvard is violating the securities laws in its Shareholder Rights Project. That project, run by Harvard professor Lucian Bebchuk, submits shareholder proposals to public companies asking them to de-stagger their boards, so that all directors are elected every year instead of electing one-third of directors a year to three-year terms. Staggered boards make activism hard and hostile takeovers nearly impossible, and so are often viewed as shareholder-unfriendly. There is some empirical evidence that they are in fact bad for shareholders. There is other empirical evidence that they are good for shareholders. There is yet other empirical evidence that they are sometimes good and sometimes bad. (This is how empirical corporate governance research always works out, by the way.) Harvard, in advocating against staggered boards, cites the research that supports its side, and doesn’t cite the research that supports the other side. Gallagher and Grundfest argue that this could be “a material omission that violates” the proxy rules. Umm? It is not exactly news that some people think staggered boards are good and others think they are bad, and that the ones who think they are bad will, you know, say that they’re bad. It would be hard to argue that Bebchuk et al. don’t believe that their arguments are true.

“If the SEC took the more draconian step of suing Harvard, the agency would be ‘in my opinion, very likely to prevail,’ Mr. Grundfest said in an interview,” though, I mean, it won’t? The purpose of this paper is to make life a bit easier for companies that are targeted by the Harvard Shareholder Rights Project. First, it will probably drive Harvard to soften the language of its proposal a bit. Second, and more importantly, it will give companies that oppose de-classification a very authoritative-sounding source of empirical data for their position (“Look, the SEC says staggered boards are good!”). And third, it may allow companies to exclude the Harvard proposal from their proxies entirely, by arguing to the SEC that it is false and misleading.

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