News Digest for August 28, 2006

There are 6 items today … Investors Without Borders | Corporate buyouts can leave firms deep in debt | Prominent Corporate Lawyers Didn’t Stop Shady Options Deals | ‘Fake owners’ are ruining capitalism | Seoul lacks charm for China’s IPO hopefuls | News Firm Cries Foul As Thomson Blocks Access to IR Websites

Investors Without Borders
Other things being equal, American investors allocate less of their stock portfolio to a foreign company if it is less forthcoming about the success or failure of its businesses, and operates in a country with weak or inconsistently applied accounting standards.

Corporate buyouts can leave firms deep in debt
A slow IPO market in 2002 and 2003 caused the buyout firms to rethink how to guarantee themselves fat payouts. That’s when many started to increasingly use something called a dividend recapitalization, which meant the companies borrowed money that they mostly wouldn’t use to invest in the business but to pay themselves back for their initial investment with a dividend.

Prominent Corporate Lawyers Didn’t Stop Shady Options Deals
But a Recorder review of SEC filings for 17 companies that had Valley lawyers serving as directors found questionable grant dates for executives at five of them, none of which had been previously associated with backdating questions.

‘Fake owners’ are ruining capitalism
It is the fake owners whom the managers have to please; and what interests these temporary owners is the share price. So it is not surprising that selling and presentational skills figure among the key managerial qualities of companies with fake owners.

Seoul lacks charm for China’s IPO hopefuls
Despite the deregulatory efforts, skepticisms still remain over the recent globalization drive of the Korean stock market in luring foreign firms.

News Firm Cries Foul As Thomson Blocks Access to IR Websites
Things started to go wrong for Kelly in August 2005 when Thomson discovered that tens of millions of hits from Quoza were skewing its web site traffic reports. Thomson issued a cease-and-desist order and blocked Quoza’s computers from its servers.

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