Where to turn for legal advice? Both inside and outside corporate counsel play an important role in advising the board of directors.
OVER THE LAST TWO YEARS, corporate governance has become front-page news. Following some spectacular failures by corporate boards to oversee properly the senior officers of public companies, the oversight role of corporate directors has been widely debated. Many commentators argue that directors have broken faith with the stockholders by...

A study on financial service trade between Australia and China.
1 A Study on Financial Service Trade between Australia and China With globalisation and difficulties with the multinational Doha round free-trade negotiation, many countries are involved in bilateral or regional free-trade-agreement (FTA) negotiations. Australia and China started in 2003 and finished in March 2005 with bilateral FTA...

Hughes Communications Announces Public Offering Pricing.
ENTERTAINMENT CLOSE-UP-22 May 2008-Hughes Communications Announces Public Offering Pricing(C)2008 - CloseUpMedia - newsdesk@closeupmedia.com Hughes Communications, a provider of broadband satellite network solutions and services, announced that the public offering of 2,239,600 shares of its common stock has priced at $50.00 per share. In the offering,...

Good grief! What's with the SEC and exec pay? This government is continuing to insert itself unwisely in boards' confidential decisions. Where is the outrage?
THE SEC IS FORCING a sampling of 350 public companies to more specifically disclose the compensation, benchmarking, and forecasting decisions of their boards and compensation committees. This insistence on increased disclosure--in the "public interest of helping investors better discern" this information--bodes ill for all fiduciaries, whether public, private, or...

Company Watch - Airbus.
Apr 7, 2008 AirAsia X, Malaysian long-haul budget carrier, has ordered 10 Airbus A330-300 aircraft with a list value of USD$2 billion to meet its expansion plans, the airline said on Thursday. This brings its total A330-300 orders from Airbus to 25, having ordered 15 planes last...

Company Watch - United Airlines.
Mar 24, 2008 Delta Air Lines and United Airlines announced a domestic downsizing to help negotiate rising fuel costs and a slowing US economy, with each carrier planning to ground 15-20 mainline aircraft this year and Delta also aiming to slash its workforce by approximately 2,000. United...

Forward-thinking for backdating? An answer to possible D&O exclusions.
More than 100 companies are under internal or Securities and Exchange Commission investigation because of the backdated stock-options issue. Because of this, the insurance industry has warned of potential directors' and officers' claims, and hinted at the industry's interests in not paying those claims, said William G....

Regulation now. (Comment).
Hearing George W. Bush boast about passing what he called "the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt" certainly gave us pause. To throw up. The idea that George W. Bush can now claim to be in the...

A go-slow approach to Sarbanes-Oxley; a "culture of conservatism" surrounds technology spending on the new law. companies prefer to hire consultants or retool existing technology rather than sink millions into new systems.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, regulators' response to the rash of financial scandals that plagued much of 2001 and 2002, has left scores of CEOs, CFOs and CROs shuddering as they try to figure out exactly what it means to be "fully compliant" in the eyes of the government. ...

'The functions of a corporate director': an address before the Harvard Business School Club of Cleveland, May 31, 1949.
Editor's Note: Sidney J. Weinberg (1891-1969) was present at the creation of modern-day corporate governance. When he became chairman of Goldman, Sachs & Co. in 1930 (having joined the firm in 1907), he would witness within a few short years the historic legislation that gave birth to the Securities...