Le « Robin des banques » s’attaque à la Caisse

14 juin 2011
Argent (TVA)

Selon l’Association québécoise des retraités des secteurs public et parapublic, 85 % des Québécois croient que les retraités de l’État devraient avoir un représentant au conseil de la Caisse.

Selon un nouveau sondage de l’Association québécoise des retraités des secteurs public et parapublic, 85 % des Québécois croient que les retraités de l’État devraient avoir un représentant au conseil d’administration de la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec. Le « Robin des banques » s’attaque à la Caisse Photo : Agence QMI

C’est également l’avis du fondateur du MÉDAC, Yves Michaud, qui juge important, et urgent de rééquilibrer la représentation des déposants au conseil d’administration de l’organisation.

« C’est absolument insensé! Les cotisants, ceux qui alimentent la Caisse de dépôt, ont deux représentants, a affirmé M. Michaud. Les autres viennent tous du monde financier. Ceux-là, les membres des conseils, des comptables, etc., qui votent des salaires de huit à dix millions $ à des présidents de banque. »

Selon M. Michaud, le manque de représentants des retraités au sein du conseil d’administration de la Caisse s’explique par le fait qu’il s’agit d’un cercle très restreint.

« Parce que le monde financier, c’est un monde secret, de petits copains qui essaient d’occuper toutes les places! Et personne ne s’occupe de faire le ménage, a ajouté M. Michaud. Il faut nettoyer les écuries d’Augias, disait-on, quand j’étais au collège. »

Autre élément du sondage, une majorité des Québécois (71 %) estime que les retraités de l’État devraient participer aux négociations des régimes de retraite du secteur public.

L’AQRP elle-même souhaite la nomination d’une personne représentant les intérêts des retraités de l’État au sein du conseil d’administration de la Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.

L’association indique que des représentants des retraités participent au conseil d’administration d’organisations comparables comme OMERS, la CARRA ou la Régie des rentes.

L’AQRP propose également un projet de loi afin d’assurer la représentation des personnes retraitées des secteurs public et parapublic dans la négociation des régimes de retraite.

Le sondage a été réalisé par la firme L’Observateur auprès de 1000 répondants de la population adulte du Québec, du 17 au 26 mai 2012. La marge d’erreur est de ± 3,2 %, 19 fois sur 20.

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Le printemps des actionnaires

La rémunération des patrons suscite les foudres des investisseurs

2012-06-09
Stéphanie Grammond, La Presse

En Europe et aux États-Unis, un mouvement de fronde s’élève contre la rémunération des dirigeants d’entreprise. La presse anglaise parle d’un « printemps des actionnaires ». Mais une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps. À long terme, quel sera l’impact de cette vague de protestations sur le mode de rémunération des grands patrons?

Le printemps est toujours la saison la plus active pour les droits des actionnaires. Mais cette année, les assemblées annuelles ont été particulièrement orageuses au Royaume – Uni et aux États – Unis. Les grands investisseurs institutionnels, normalement peu bruyants, ont dénoncé haut et fort la rémunération excessive des dirigeants des sociétés inscrites en Bourse.

Cette semaine encore, la foudre des actionnaires est tombée sur Extrata qui a avalé la canadienne Falconbridge en 2006. Le géant minier a annoncé le versement de primes de rétention de 270 millions de dollars pour s’assurer que 73 hauts dirigeants demeurent avec l’entreprise après sa mégafusion avec Glencore.

Ces « menottes dorées » ont soulevé les protestations de Fidelity et Standard Life qui les jugent « inacceptables et déprimantes », surtout que les dirigeants d’Extrata appuient déjà la fusion.

La colère des investisseurs gronde depuis quelques mois, avec en toile de fond le mouvement Occupy Wall Street et les mesures d’austérité pour sortir de la crise européenne.

« C’est de bon augure pour l’avenir. Ça démontre qu’on arrive à un moment charnière où il y a un meilleur équilibre entre les pouvoirs », estime Olivier Gamache, président du Groupe Investissement Responsable.

Ainsi, plus de la moitié des actionnaires de Citigroup se sont opposés à la rémunération de 15 millions offerte au dirigeant de la banque américaine. Une première à Wall Street. Il faut dire que la loi Dodd Frank, adoptée en réaction à la crise du crédit, exige la tenue d’un vote consultatif (Say-on-Pay) depuis 2010. Plusieurs pays comme le Royaume–Uni, l’Australie et la Suède, imposent aussi le Say-on-Pay.

En Angleterre, les investisseurs ne se sont pas privés. Ils ont voté contre le salaire du patron de l’assureur Aviva qui a ensuite démissionné. Et face à la pression, le dirigeant de la société financière Barclays a lui-même refusé la moitié de son bonus.

Coup de barre en France

La France a emboîté le pas la semaine dernière. Le nouveau gouvernement socialiste de François Hollande a annoncé que la rémunération des patrons de société d’État serait limitée à 20 fois le salaire de l’employé le moins bien payé. Le patron de la société d’énergie nucléaire EDF, verra ses émoluments tomber de plus de 60 %, à 775 000 $.

Le gouvernement espère aussi limiter la rémunération dans plusieurs multinationales dont il est actionnaire minoritaire. La semaine dernière, l’État français a utilisé sa participation de 16 % dans Air France-KLM pour signifier son désaccord face à la prime accordée à l’ancien dirigeant pour s’assurer qu’il n’aille pas travailler chez un concurrent.

Une question d’équité et de décence salariale, au moment où l’économie et le marché du travail sont minés par la crise européenne…

Ascension canadienne

Mais une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps. « Je doute que ces agitations mènent à une grande réforme de la gouvernance », dit Yvan Allaire, président du conseil de l’Institut sur la gouvernance d’organisations privées et publiques (IGOPP) qui vient de publier une étude approfondie sur la rémunération des dirigeants.

Il constate que la rémunération des patrons au Canada a fait un bond important depuis 12 ans. Les chefs de la direction des 60 plus grandes sociétés inscrites à la Bourse canadiennes ont reçu une rémunération record de 6,2 millions de dollars en 2010, presque trois fois plus qu’en 1998.

[…]

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Investor activist Yves Michaud fights what he sees as corporate abuses

May 19, 2012
Nicolas Van Praet, The National Post

Montreal — In a tiny basement office in a grey stone building in central Montreal, Yves Michaud’s staff members are plotting their next shareholder insurrection.

It’s annual general meeting season and Mr. Michaud and his colleagues at the Mouvement d’éducation et de défense des actionnaires (MÉDAC) have been busy doing what they’ve become known for : Getting in corporate Canada’s face with uncomfortable questions and lofty shareholder proposals in a bid for better accountability.

Earlier this week they showed up at the Power Corp. meeting wielding four investor recommendations, including one that would allow executives to exercise stock options only when their companies have achieved measurable objectives like higher earnings. Before that, they pestered Bombardier Inc., blasting the company for giving its executives pay increases while the stock languishes less than $4 per share.

At the National Bank of Canada shareholders meeting this year, Mr. Michaud, a former provincial politician and an ardent separatist who relishes language and appears to love to hear himself talk, was booed. But that’s really no surprise. This is a man who once lectured management at a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce AGM for more than an hour in a performance The Gazette in Montreal likened to “a Fidel Castro May Day address.” The bank’s then-chief executive Al Flood was forced to cancel his own speech to investors. Related

Lauded by some and loathed by others, MÉDAC has become over the past 15 years one of the loudest voices for corporate governance nationwide and one of the biggest critics of excessive executive pay. The group founded by Mr. Michaud is little known outside Quebec. And yet, its message has rarely echoed more loudly than now.

‘Our paid members and our board members, I think, are militants’

It was MÉDAC that won the legal right for retail investors to make proposals at AGMs. Long before Arthur Andersen LLP botched the auditing of Enron, it was MÉDAC that got Canada’s banks to disclose the consulting fees they pay to their public accountants. And say on pay, Canada’s non-binding advisory vote that gives investors in banks and other companies a voice in executive compensation? MÉDAC takes credit for that, too.

“Our paid members and our board members, I think, are militants,” says Fernand Daoust, MÉDAC’s president. “I don’t like that word. But they are people who are absolutely scandalized by the liberty that current company leaders are taking on remuneration…. There is, among retail shareholders, a profound indifference toward these things. We’re trying to wake them up.”

Canada needs more investors who stake a public position against certain corporate abuses, says Michel Nadeau, executive director of Montreal’s Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations. “Anything that can help, any group that can help to make the voice of the shareholder heard, whether it be institutional or retail investors, I support that.” Advertisement

Mr. Nadeau says he is disappointed that it took an American like Bill Ackman to clean house at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd., one of Canada’s oldest companies. He says Canadian investors failed in their duty to demand that previous management boost the railway’s performance.

Some shareholders have sought private meetings with companies to make their voice heard. MÉDAC’s approach is the opposite : Buy the minimum shares required in a company to become an owner, research its perceived corporate governance weak spots, then confront the company publicly at its AGM while trying to woo as many shareholders onside as it can.

It doesn’t always work of course. The vast majority of the 58 shareholder proposals MÉDAC has made since 1997 have been voted down. Perhaps the biggest unfulfilled item on its wish list is a requirement that all companies trading on stock exchanges disclose the median salary of their employees and to hold the so-called “fairness ratio” (the ratio of the top executive’s pay to the average employee salary) to a maximum of 30.

Still, there have been successes as well. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce shareholders overwhelmingly backed Mr. Michaud’s 1999 proposal that its directors must hold shares in the bank equal to six times the annual fee they’re paid for their services. The argument was that by watching over shareholder interests, directors would also be protecting their own interests.

Mr. Michaud is perhaps best known for controversial comments he made about the Jewish people during a radio interview in 2000 when he was seeking to become a Parti Québécois candidate in a by-election that year. The remarks earned him official condemnation from the legislature and were said to have contributed to Lucien Bouchard’s decision to resign as premier the following year.

So how did a committed separatist with a contentious past come to command so much air time at annual meetings, given his organization has only one paid employee and annual revenue from its 1,500 members that barely tops $50,000?

In two words : personal misfortune.

The moustachioed Mr. Michaud, 82, took to defending shareholders after he lost part of his retirement savings in the 1992 near-collapse of General Trustco of Canada Inc., which was later bought by National Bank of Canada. National, and other banks, have been among his top targets ever since.

Critics of MÉDAC, who include some prominent business leaders, dismiss the group as a highly political organization driven by the bias of Mr. Michaud’s separatist convictions. Mr. Daoust is also an avowed sovereigntist, and former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau recently joined the MÉDAC board.

Opponents point to Mr. Michaud’s legal efforts to obtain the financial statements of Power Corp. newspaper unit Gesca as evidence of his crusade. Power, controlled by the pro-Canada Desmarais family, has objected.

In his September 2009 ruling on the case, Quebec Appeal Court judge Pierre Dalphond noted : “Mr. Michaud wants to show that the ‘Desmarais empire’ financially supports Gesca to promote the federalist cause, which displeases this long-time separatist.”

For his part, Mr. Michaud sounds undeterred. Though he leaves much of the actual company meeting battles these days to other MÉDAC members, he still commands the bluster of a determined activist.

Speaking in a brief interview this week, Mr. Michaud said bankers are more avaricious than ever, the financial world is full of “bandits,” and AGMs remain “parodies” of real shareholder democracy. “I’m sickened to the limit of my existence,” he said with his typical flair for the overdramatic.

Mr. Michaud said he wished there were more activists like him outside Quebec. Whether the country could handle another Yves Michaud is another question altogether.

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Power Corp owners target of student protests in Montreal

May 15, 2012
Nicolas Van Praet, Financial Post

MONTREAL — One of Canada’s wealthiest and most politically connected families has come under attack as the force and rhetoric of Quebec’s student protests move from the streets into corporate shareholder meetings.

The Desmarais clan, which controls Power Corp., was the target Tuesday of angry demonstrators gathered in Old Montreal outside a hotel where the company’s annual general meeting was taking place.

A line of police in riot gear guarded the hotel’s main entrance while protesters chanted in French : “We must fight the thieves in ties” and “Your wealth is our poverty.”

‘There are radical groups that systematically want to destabilize the Montreal economy’

The demonstration was called by a student group. But Quebec finance minister Raymond Bachand said many of the protesters have nothing to do with students demanding a tuition freeze. “There are radical groups that systematically want to destabilize the Montreal economy,” he said Tuesday. “They are anti-capitalists, Marxists.”

While company chairman and chief executive Paul Desmarais Jr. shared the details of Power’s $264-million first- quarter net profit with shareholders, officers on horseback outside were pushing demonstrators back. “Our results show we have a solid risk management strategy,” he said.

Risk, as it turns out, was on the minds of many of the assembled investors. Some were checking the Montreal Police’s twitter feed on their BlackBerries for updates on the clashes. Others eyed officers stationed in the hotel corridors.

Daniel Thouin of Quebec shareholder rights group Médac made a reference to the protesters with this comment : “[Our organization] has been making proposals for the last 15 years. And those proposals aim to improve the management of publicly traded companies. They also aim for a certain justice in the distribution of wealth created by the capitalist system. You’ve all seen this morning people in the streets shouting ‘Occupy Montreal’, ‘Occupy Wall Street… We’re fighting to bring a different voice to shareholder meetings.” Advertisement

Mr. Thouin denounced Power Corp.’s executive pay, noting the average salary of the top five senior officers was $3.4-million last year. That’s 73 times the average Canadian salary of roughly $46,000, he said, and comes even as the company’s share price has fallen 37.7 % over the past four years.

Médac official Fernand Daoust made the same argument last week at Bombardier Inc.’s annual meeting, saying the company’s remuneration for senior leaders was “shamefully high” considering its stock performance. “These exorbitant pay packages are provoking disapproval within the general population,” he said. “We have to listen to the sound of this disapproval, which can appear with force.”

‘We’re fighting to bring a different voice to shareholder meetings’

Mr. Desmarais spent a significant amount of time talking about Power’s social and corporate responsibility. The company, which controls insurer Great West Lifeco and the Gesca Inc. newspaper group among other investments, needs to better communicate its efforts, he said, adding Power creates jobs and donates time and money to the various communities where it operates.

“How could you not be concerned right now in terms of what’s going on?” Mr. Desmarais said in response to a question by a reporter on the protests that have shaken Quebec’s political class and caused millions worth of dollars in lost productivity.

“Like all citizens, we are concerned. But we want this issue to be resolved hopefully in a respectful fashion. Let’s start with respect. With a democratic way. Within the rule of law. And that we come to an agreement that makes sense and where everybody invests in the future of our students. But everybody’s got to participate in that.”

For more than three months, Quebec has been gripped by protests and public disorder over the government’s plan to raise university and college tuition. Many gatherings have turned violent and police helicopters have become an almost nightly noise in central Montreal. Students are defying court orders by blocking others from attending class.

The government’s latest offer of a $254 annual increase over seven years has been met with a sound rejection by students, who have been joined by non-students in their fight.

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