Wednesday 22 April 2009

Great speech from Paul Myners...

City minister Paul Myners gave an interesting speech to the Association of Investment Companies yesterday morning. There's an FT report and comment here and here, but I recommend having a read of the whole thing. It's not on the HMT website yet (I suppose they might be a bit busy) but I'll post up a link when it is.

Some things he said -

The remit of the Walker Review is going to be wider than just banks, if some of the recommendations are applicable to other financial institutions.

Shareholder activism on pay has been too focused on directors. Investors need to think about pay across companies, and what behaviours they are trying to incentivise. He said if they had thought more deeply about this stuff the widening gulf between execs and others in the same company may not have been so extreme.

Also said that there should be consideration of whether the vote on remuneration could in some way be binding.

He had a major go at the ISC (no complaint here....!) for not having published anything since last summer, despite the crisis. He wants to talk to all the ISC members about this.

Also suggsted that the Combined Code had too little in it about the role of shareholders.

No comments: