Catching up on CEO COIs

As noted in a previous post, CEO’s tend to have different COIs than the rest of us. Today’s post will look at a few CEO-related COI stories that have been in the news lately.

Most notably, yesterday the pharma company Novartis dropped a controversial plan to pay outgoing CEO Daniel Vasella up to $78 million over the course of six years. As described by Forbes, “The board had originally justified its decision in order to ‘protect’ the drug maker, since Vasella knows ‘the company’s business intimately, having built the leading R&D organization and personally recruited most of the top executives.’ In other words, the payoff was hush money designed to keep him from telling secrets to competitors.” The notion that a board could even consider paying a CEO something extra for keeping shareholder secrets is – at least on its face – pretty distressing.

Public sector organizations have CEO’s, too – and various press accounts have noted that super-lawyer Mary Jo White, who President Obama has nominated to head the Securities and Exchange Commission,  will need to take conflict avoidance measures if confirmed for that post.  But as noted in this recent story in Bloomberg News , while it is hardly unusual for a lawyer going from private practice to public service to have COIs of this sort, White’s particular contemplated mitigation approach to her potential COIs (which concern not only her law firm partnership but that of her husband, himself a prominent securities lawyer) appears to be of less than optimal efficacy.

I should stress that I don’t think there is any chance that White will personally act in a conflicted way in the discharge of her duties at the SEC.  But individual honesty is presumably not the end of the analysis regarding any leader’s COIs – and that is particularly so where a) the leader leads a government agency whose mandate includes, among other things, addressing COIs (at least in the financial services field);  b) that agency has an uneven record over the years in enforcing that mandate; and c) there is a reasonably strong concern among press and public that the reason for the agency’s shortfall is one of regulatory capture.

And speaking of the SEC, there is this story   from yesterday about a deposition of hedge fund chief Steve Cohen whose firm, SAC Capital, is being investigated for insider trading.  Cohen apparently testified: “I’ve read the compliance manual, but I don’t remember exactly what it says,’’ and, according to John Coffee, a noted securities-law professor at Columbia, “That’s a dangerous statement. The fact that he doesn’t know what’s in his compliance manual is useful to the SEC,” should it decide to pursue the firm on a “control person” theory of liability (which essentially involves supervisory neglect).

But is this really a COI issue?  It is in the sense that under Delaware law compliance oversight failures by directors and officers can be deemed a violation of the duty of loyalty, which – even if not technically involving a conflict – is from the same neck of the woods as COIs.

Finally, just today an internal investigation cleared former Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon of any “intentional wrongdoing” in connection with the controversial borrowing practices that were the subject of the prior post linked to at the top of this one.  But presumably it did not do the same with respect to creating an appearance of a conflict  – given the facts as described in the prior post, that could not be done with a straight face.  And with CEOs, proper appearances can matter just as much as avoiding actual COIs, as evidenced by the great costs and disruption that befell Chesapeake when the borrowing practices became known to the company’s shareholders and others.  Indeed, the company evidently continues to be the subject of an SEC investigation concerning these matters, and COI watchers may be able to look to the outcome of that inquiry for an early view of how seriously that agency will address conflicts in the era of Mary Jo White.