news blog from Felipa

*Agency determining if disclosures are “understandable”*Review could help SEC craft better questions for advisersBy Suzanne BarlynBALTIMORE, Oct 18 (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators are taking their first stab at reviewing “plain-English” disclosure brochures that most investment advisers developed earlier this year to comply with new rules.The review could ultimately lead to improvements to questions the Securities and Exchange Commission uses to help advisers make clearer disclosures to clients.These more transparent disclosures could be particularly useful for customers or clients of larger businesses where there are many conflicts of interest, said Daniel Kahl, assistant director of the SEC’s office of investment adviser regulation, late on Monday.SEC staffers are looking at disclosure documents advisers filed as the agency’s Form ADV Part 2, which it amended after a ten-year review. The rules require the roughly 11,000 investment advisers registered with the agency to file, for the first time, a publicly available brochure that includes plain English disclosure about the firm’s business. Most advisers had to file the brochure by March 31, 2011.Now the SEC is trying to determine how well those efforts turned out, said Kahl. An initial look revealed that the brochures were “very, very informative,” said Kahl, speaking at a conference organized by the National Society of Compliance Professionals, an organization for securities industry compliance officials. Investors can view the brochures on a database available through the SEC’s website.Brochures for smaller advisers that served a “targeted” group of clients are easy for laypeople to understand, said Kahl. But brochures for larger, more complex firms revealed “the writing of more lawyers and more conflicts,” said Kahl.”It’s not a criticism, but it’s something we need to look at to see if there are areas where we can improve the questions” to elicit clearer responses, he said.EARLY STAGES”We’re very much in the early stages of scoping out the project,” Kahl told Reuters. The SEC is not looking at every brochure, but could look at potentially hundreds, depending on staffing, he said. The reviews aren’t examinations, but an effort to “assess the quality of the disclosure,” he said.Determining if disclosures are understandable will depend, in part, on an investment adviser’s clients, said Kahl. Disclosures for institutional clients, for example, may be more complex than disclosures for individual investors.There is presently no timetable for completing the project. It is “hard to say” whether recommendations will follow the review, he said. Advisers had to follow 174 pages of directions for writing the brochure. Many were uncertain about how to comply.But even more direction from the SEC may only add to the confusion, especially for firms that offer multiple investment services, said Keith Marks, a partner for Ascendant Compliance Management, a consultancy in Salisbury, Connecticut. “Firms have to look at some broadly based questions and make the effort to apply them,” he said.The reviews could also lead to full-blown examinations for advisers with the worst brochures, whom the agency may view as posing a greater risk to investors, said Marks.

* HEOS says will also withhold support from Siskind and KnightBy Sinead CruiseLONDON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch’s multi-million dollar campaign to win back the hearts and minds of News Corporation’s independent investors suffered a new blow on Friday after another key shareholder group called for his eviction from its board.Hermes Equity Ownership Services (HEOS), the shareholder advisory service affiliated to Britain’s largest pension fund, issued a rallying cry to investors to vote against all Murdoch family re-elections to the board of the embattled media group at next week’s annual general meeting on Oct. 21.”The time is right for the company to appoint an independent chairman to rebuild trust, help correct the governance discount, and ensure that the interests of all investors are properly represented,” Jennifer Walmsley, Director of Hermes Equity Ownership Services, said.”We have a battle on our hands to demonstrate the strength of shareholder opposition because so many shares are held by the family or by people affiliated with the family,” she told Reuters.The organisation, which votes on behalf of the BT Pension Fund and more than 20 other institutional clients running $140 billion of assets, has also called for an independent investigation into the phone hacking scandal that led to the closure of top-selling British tabloid The News of the World.Besides seeking the removal of Murdoch and sons James and Lachlan, HEOS — whose members hold 0.5 percent of News Corp’s shares — Hermes is also withholding support for the re-election of directors Arthur Siskind and Andrew Knight, citing concerns for their independence.The statement from HEOS is the latest in a flurry of anti-Murdoch lobbying from corporate governance watchdogs and proxy voting companies all over the world.Earlier this week, Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) said Murdoch and 10 other News Corp directors should be ousted from board in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, which it said “laid bare a striking lack of stewardship and independence”.The ISS statement prompted News Corp, which has bought back more than $1 billion of its stock since August, to step up its appeal for shareholder support with a letter that reiterated its strong financial performance in the face of the flagging global economy.But Walmsley said investors were growing impatient for fundamental change that would see the infamous ‘Murdoch discount’ gone for good.News Corp shares typically trade below rival media groups because the market applies a discount to reflect Murdoch’s tight control of the company and a tendency to make decisions that shareholders may not support.”There’s an enormous groundswell of opposition and I think there are a lot of investors out there who feel … the governance structures in place are clearly not sufficient to safeguard the interests of minority investors,” Walmsley said.”There is a huge problem with shareholder democracy at News Corp — it breaches what we see as a fundamental shareholder right of ‘one share, one vote’,” she said.The war of words between News Corp and its shareholders over the need for a sweeping purge of its board is likely to revive a debate over whether James Murdoch should be forced to give up his role as chairman of British Sky Broadcasting .Investors in BSkyB — News Corp’s erstwhile bid target — will vote on the make-up of their board next month.

The event is separate from an October 19 celebration that Apple plans for all its employees at its Cupertino campus. An Apple spokesman would only confirm a private service, without elaborating.According to the invitation, guests have been asked to RSVP to Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization founded by Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, the Journal reported.

The strikers are targeting 150 businesses in the Alpine country, including specialist steel group Voestalpine .Voestalpine refused to comment on the strikes or wage negotiations. The company’s main steel works are based in the northern city of Linz. The group produced around 2 million tonnes of steel in its first quarter to end-June.”If there is no progress at the weekend then things are going to get really serious on Monday,” Rainer Wimmer, the head of industry union Pro-Ge, told the Austria Press Agency.The metal workers say employers must take into account 2.8 percent annual inflation earlier this year and healthy industrial growth. Inflation reached 3.6 percent in September, according to the national definition.Employers have said they can afford a 3.65 percent wage rise with a 200 euro ($274) one-off payment. They say that the metal workers are being offered the highest wage rise of all sectors in Austria at a time of economic uncertainty. ($1 = 0.730 Euros)

But her latest, “The Things We Cherished,” combines a look at Jewish history up to and during World War Two with the trial of an elderly man accused of war crimes who maintains that proof of his innocence is in an elaborate clock last seen in Nazi Germany.The mother of three children under three, Jenoff also teaches law and says that while she once wrote from five to seven in the mornings before going to work, she now has trained herself to use every bit of free time she gets, writing in short bursts whenever she canShe spoke with Reuters about how law and her experiences in Poland as a diplomat informed her writing.Q: What got you started on this book?A: “The idea for the book itself came for a clock that my husband gave me for our first wedding anniversary, known as an ‘anniversary clock.’ It’s called that because it only needs to be wound once a year. It’s a beautiful antique clock, and as I looked at it, I started imagining where the clock had been and the history of the clock, and a fictitious history emerged for me — the clock’s about a hundred years old. So I envisioned it in different places through time throughout the 20th century, and it became a metaphor for the Jewish experience in 20th century Europe. Going back even before that, of course, my broader interest in the subject of the Holocaust and World War Two comes from my time as a diplomat with the State Department in Krakow, Poland, working on Polish-Jewish relations and post-Holocaust issues.”Q: What is it about World War Two and Jewish-German relationships that fascinates you and fascinates us?A: “For me personally, I was in Poland for a few years … and really immersed in issues that had arisen out of the Holocaust. I also became very personally close to the surviving Jewish community there, and I also came to know their stories. The period of time was very much vivid and alive for me. I think more broadly for people, it’s really about an incredibly difficult time where people were just really pushed outside their element and forced to take actions and choices that they otherwise would not have been. I think it’s just such a fertile period for talking about choice and consequence, and all those things. What would I have done in those circumstances? I think people tend to put themselves in those shoes.”Q: What are the messages for us in this period?A: “There’s a few things. I really think it’s important to avoid painting people as black or white and using the broad brush strokes we tend to use in history, because things were a lot more gray and nuanced than that, especially in terms of people and their choices and individual responses, and I want people to take a look at that.”The other question the book raises is that the elderly man was a Nazi collaborator, and the question becomes, are we going to prosecute war crimes from 60-plus years ago? What value does that have? Should we be spending the resources on more modern day atrocities in the Sudan and elsewhere? Or, is this important because of its symbolism for the modern day atrocities? I don’t give readers one conclusion or another, I just want them to think about it.”Q: How did being a diplomat and lawyer feed your writing?A: “I don’t write autobiographical material because I personally think that real life makes terrible plot, but it makes for great setting. So all of the experiences I had abroad really go into the place, making the place come alive. I’m still writing about all these experiences from more than a decade ago. Now, being a lawyer is interesting. ‘Things We Cherished’ is actually my first book with a lawyer protagonist and so I wonder if the lawyer is starting to creep into my writing after all these years. But there’s a lot of synergies between legal writing and fiction writing. In fact, in my other life right now I’m an academic and teach law school, and I actually just got a grant because I’m writing about these synergies — how can these two be brought together, why do so many lawyers want to be writers? Why do so many writers write about the law?”I think that the help goes both ways. Being a novelist helps you to tell a compelling narrative and craft a story for your client. I also think there are a ton of fiction writing techniques that novelists use that can be imported into legal writing to jump-start creativity and bring life to work. There’s a lot that novel writing brings to being a lawyer.”The single biggest thing that being a lawyer brought to my fiction writing was the ability to revise my work. When you’re a writer, people don’t give you solutions, they give you problems. Your editor and your agent say there’s not enough tension in the third arc, and such. You have to take their feedback and incorporate it in a way that’s your own. That’s very much like being a lawyer, where somebody marks up your brief and you have to go back and redo it. One of the three biggest things that’s helped me as a novelist is the ability to revise, and I think that comes from the lawyer world.”

Never far from controversy in his playing days, Shoaib Akhtar has kicked up quite a storm in India with his autobiography “Controversially Yours”, questioning the integrity of most players he came across. And one of them happens to be India’s favourite son Sachin Tendulkar, owner of virtually all batting records worth owning but still not a match-winner in Shoaib’s book. Also, the “Rawalpindi Express” claims Tendulkar, at one stage, was mortally scared of his raw pace. Much to his delight, the Indian media seem to have swallowed the bait. They have reacted with baffled fury, wondering how the erratic speedster can point an accusing finger at someone like Tendulkar, whose integrity remains beyond doubt even after two decades in international cricket. Cricket is often called religion in an otherwise secular India and Tendulkar is its presiding deity. Even the local media treat him like the sacred cow, completely untouchable. With his harsh views of statistically the greatest batsman ever, Shoaib has clearly touched a raw nerve in India. Probably this is what Shoaib, and his publishers, intended to achieve. After such a tumultuous release, they would be surprised if the copies of the book do not fly off shelves across India. It does not take an expert to tell us that much of the vitriol in Shoaib’s autobiography “Controversially Yours” is adulterated. In fact, it’s more marketing than malice. In this interview to CNN-IBN, Shoaib does a U-turn as spectacular as his albatross-like celebration after taking a wicket. “…he is the greatest among all of them. World cricket needs to be thankful to Sachin Tendulkar… Cricket needs to be thankful to great Sachin to have played this game,” Shoaib says. There seems a method in it. Australian Adam Gilchrist tried something similar in his 2008 autobiography “True Colours”. Gilchrist questioned Tendulkar’s integrity in the “Monkeygate” affair, prompting many Indians to order a copy of the book before he called the Indian cricketer to clarify the comments.