Sky Blog
Summary
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $896,000 concerning its conversion of notes into voting securities of USG Corporation in December 2013, which was more than five years after Berkshire’s HSR Act filing to acquire …
A recent Delaware Supreme Court decision highlights the growing risks to companies of extensive statutory “books and records” demands that recently have become a favorite in the toolkit of plaintiffs’ lawyers and even activist shareholders conducting what are often speculative …
On July 15, 2014, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (DC Circuit) ruled that if the President, pursuant to his powers under the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Defense Production Act of 1950 (DPA), deprives a foreign …
Alongside the more typical summer fare, such as coverage of the best beach reading and the latest action movie blockbuster, this summer the media have been abuzz with seemingly daily reports on the latest so-called “inversion” transactions shifting a U.S.-based …
From 2004 through 2010, the number of appraisal petitions filed in Delaware rose and fell roughly in parallel with the overall level of merger activity, with appraisal rights being asserted in about 5% of the transactions for which they were …
SUMMARY
Citing a trend in recent years of private equity firms acquiring insurers, particularly life insurers writing fixed and indexed annuity contracts, the New York State Department of Financial Services on May 14, 2014 released for public comment proposed amendments …
In a recent decision, Chen v. Howard-Anderson, the Delaware Chancery Court once again questioned the reasonableness of how a board conducted the sale of a company when it permitted stockholder claims to go to trial. The decision provides yet …
Two recent developments have changed the playing field of corporate governance: (1) the Delaware Chancery Court’s ruling this month on the use of a two-tier poison pill in the Sotheby’s case (and Sotheby’s quick and conciliatory settlement two days later, …
The best part of a Delaware Chancery Court opinion is the first 30 or so pages. In most important cases, the opinion typically starts by telling a story – a detailed account of the people who figure in the dispute, …
The following post comes to us from Charles Korsmo, Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Minor Myers, Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School. It is based on their recent paper entitled “Appraisal Arbitrage and the …
The Pershing Square-Valeant hostile bid for Allergan has captured the imagination. Other companies are wondering whether they too will wake up one morning to find a raider-activist tag-team wielding a stealth block of their stock. Serial acquirers are asking whether …
In Great Hill Equity Partners IV, LP v. SIG Growth Equity Fund I, LLLP, Chancellor Strine of the Delaware Chancery Court recently reaffirmed that the target company in a Delaware merger is the sole holder of the attorney-client privilege …
In October 2009, Dimensional Associates, LLC (“Dimensional”), the controlling stockholder of The Orchard Enterprises, Inc. (“Orchard”), which held 42% of Orchard’s outstanding common stock and 99% of its outstanding convertible preferred stock that collectively gave it approximately 53% of Orchard’s …
The following comes to us from Paul C. Hilal, a Partner at Pershing Square Capital Management, a New York City-based hedge fund founded in 2004.
Is shareholder activism good for the world?
A simple question, and yet it’s the subject …
Our Blog’s most recent Marketplace for Ideas series has considered whether the SEC should tighten its rules under the Williams Act, which now require that investors must disclose purchases of a 5% or greater stake in public companies within ten …
On March 14, 2014, the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the Court of Chancery’s 2013 decision in In re MFW Shareholders Litigation , holding that in going-private mergers where there is a controlling stockholder, the use of both a truly independent …
This year’s “SEC Speaks” conference in Washington, D.C., was most notable for an obvious shift in the SEC’s enforcement priorities. Several significant issues and efforts that had been the subject of extensive discussion last year – including financial crisis and …
In a recent paper, Professors Lucian Bebchuk and Robert Jackson have extended Professor Bebchuk’s extreme and eccentric campaign against director-centric governance into a new realm—that of the Constitution of the United States. They claim that “serious questions” exist about …
In a landmark decision now on appeal, In re MFW Shareholders Litigation, the Delaware Chancery Court ruled that a freezeout merger negotiated by an independent special negotiating committee (SNC) and conditioned in advance on approval by a majority-of-the-minority (MOM) vote …