Corporate Affairs

Interesting piece:

The 'Corporate Democracy' Oxymoron
The Wall Street Journal
Henry G. Manne
January 2, 2007
They're back! Every 20 or 30 years shareholder democracy ideas come back in vogue, and their
time seems to have arrived again -- with a vengeance.


The SEC is huddling on whether to facilitate direct shareholder nomination of directors through a
new interpretation of its shareholder proposal rule. A prominent professor at Harvard Law
School, Lucian Bebchuk, proposes, among other democratizing moves, amending state
corporation laws to encourage contested elections for board members. There is ongoing
controversy about whether mutual funds are making sufficient disclosure to investors of how
they vote on various portfolio corporate matters. And European corporate governance circles are
in a dither because the EU failed in a recent directive to qualify the usual one-share-one-vote rule
with something approaching one-shareholder-one-vote. The list could be expanded considerably.

Read the rest here