Disclosure: Why Plenty of Companies are Failing English

In 1998, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed a proposal requiring the use of plain English in the filing of prospectuses. The move was an attempt by the SEC to provide greater accessibility to the documents for individual investors. While the directive was largely applauded, some compan...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 21, 2000

Can Comdisco Ventures Escape Incubator Hell?

Sometimes hanging with the wrong crowd can brand you for life. Just don’t tell that to Comdisco Inc., which hopes to convince the investing public that its profitable Ventures business is not an incubator. But the company is going to have to challenge some preconceived notions among investors, wh...

By Craig Schneider • Nov. 20, 2000

Restatement Blues

Here’s another verse of those bad old “restatement blues.” You’re a CFO of a prominent public company that’s materially misstated its earnings and now must issue a restatement. Besides the prospects of a plummeting stock price, possible accounting fraud by your underlings, and suits by angry shar...

By David Katz • Nov. 17, 2000

Pro Forma Performances

Are GAAP net earnings on the endangered species list? Pro forma per- share figures in earnings announcements, a number derived after removing an expanding list of items and sometimes real cash expenses, seem to be crowding out traditional earnings in many industries. But who can blame the CFO? Th...

By George Donnelly • Nov. 1, 2000

The Feast is Over

After years of serving up banquets of low- priced coverage, the property-casualty insurance business has decided to close the kitchen door and improve its results. CFOs can thus expect to see double-digit premium hikes in many lines of coverage as their organizations negotiate their insurance ren...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2000

SIDEBAR: A Flight to Quality?

With the current southward drift of the NASDAQ, might a flight to quality that includes interest in newly seductive insurance stocks be afoot? If that’s true, the higher premiums plaguing CFOs might be recouped by their companies’ investment in insurance stocks.In the last year, p-c stocks have c...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2000

Parrying the Litigation Threat

Samsonite Corp. was struggling with some heavy baggage as it attempted to recapitalize a couple of years ago. The cause of the load: shareholder litigation, filed in the wake of the stock-price free fall from a failed attempt to sell the company. The suits hampered the Denver-based manufacturer’s...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 1, 2000

Fair Warnings

Amid the surge of earnings preannouncements that roiled the stock market in September and early October, most commentators saw signs of an economic slowdown. They were only partly right, because quarterly warnings about corporate profits will be more common now that CFOs risk SEC sanctions if the...

By Stephen Barr • Nov. 1, 2000

The Tax Noose Tightens

The coils of COLI are tightening. Past use of highly leveraged, corporate-owned life insurance(COLI), an alluring tax shelter in the early 1990s, is looming as a threat to many prominent corporations in the wake of a federal court ruling that dubbed one such arrangement a “sham” aimed solely at t...

By David Katz • Oct. 23, 2000

Is a Bank Deal in Liberty Mutual’s Future?

Liberty Mutual Group’s management may be playing it a little coy in not revealing any specific plans once its restructuring into a mutual holding company is finished. But the company will at least have the flexibility to make deals outside of insurance. If nothing else, the new structure will mak...

By David Katz • Oct. 13, 2000

Bad Chat and Cybersmears

Many companies battle the effects of bad chat and cybersmears — disparaging material posted on the Internet’s many bulletin boards, message boards, newsrooms, and other common areas. These battles often result in lawsuits for defamation, business disparagement, tortious interference with a contra...

By Courtney L. Birnbaum and Dori Ann Hanswirth • Oct. 1, 2000

Building a Better Bureaucracy

Al Gore’s personal involvement aside, there’s no doubt that the federal government can take credit for creating the Internet. But while E- commerce is now routinely discussed in such terms as “B2B” and “B2C,” the letter “G” has been conspicuously absent.No longer. Government entities from Capitol...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Oct. 1, 2000

Top Cops of Risk

Michael Hofmann’s job didn’t exist in January. In February, Hofmann became the first chief risk officer (CRO) of Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc., a privately held diversified energy company. His title gives him oversight responsibility for several risk-related areas that had previously been ke...

By Russ Banham • Sept. 1, 2000

Information for All. Will Companies Clam Up?

The mantra is: a level playing field for all investors. But the recently approved Securities and Exchange Commission rule that seeks to eliminate selective disclosure may redefine the relationship between companies and the analysts that cover them so that less, not more, information is available....

By Kris Frieswick • Aug. 1, 2000

No Shareholders Allowed

Everyone hates to be ignored, especially shareholders. But according to a recent finding by the Investor Responsibility Research Center, they should be used to it. The data showed that between 1998 and the first quarter of 2000, only 15 percent of the nonbinding shareholder proposals approved by ...

By Kris Frieswick • Aug. 1, 2000

The Whisper Game

At a time when finance executives have become adept at managing Wall Street expectations, a new hurdle has entered the realm of investor relations: whisper numbers.And unlike the estimates of a cadre of analysts, whisper earnings expectations have a secret life of their own. “With the whisper-num...

By Stephen Barr • July 1, 2000

Better Balance

While shareholder lawsuits show no sign of abating, the recent settlement of a class-action suit against Cendant Corp. may represent a sea change in securities litigation. Yet that change has less to do with the unprecedented size of the settlement than with the fact that institutional investors ...

By Andrew Osterland • June 1, 2000

Power Struggle

When Jonathan Swann took a job in the corporate finance department at The Limited Inc., in 1995, he was happy to escape the turmoil at Dayton Power & Light, which was struggling with the pending deregulation of the electric industry. The Limited, a $9.7 billion (in revenues) clothing retailer...

By Tim Reason • June 1, 2000

Whatever the Weather

Like a farmer in the Great Depression, Peter Cox battled Mother Nature with little more than skyward eyes and mumbled hopes. Although the CFO of United Grain Growers (UGG) has never tilled an acre, he knows full well that the earnings of the Winnipeg, Manitoba-based grain handler, with $120 milli...

By Russ Banham • June 1, 2000

Hazards of the Deal

Last year, the deal consolidating six metals-finishing companies into Lombard Technologies faced a potential roadblock. The private equity firm funding the amalgamation, Miami-based HIG Capital Management, wanted assurance that any as-yet-undiscovered pollution problems wouldn’t crop up one day a...

By Russ Banham • May 1, 2000

Going Virtual

The first 800-pound gorillas of the business-to-business (B2B) E- commerce world arrived on the same day last November, when, hours apart, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. announced they were establishing Internet trading exchanges for their supply chains. Each giant automaker annually buy...

By Edward Teach • May 1, 2000

Tasting One’s Own Medicine

It’s a pension fund that makes companies flinch. Some may find it ironic, then, that the friend of shareholders, pension giant TIAA- CREF, has shareholder problems of its own.The $280 billion fund has been nagged lately by a group of advocates for “socially positive” investing, who claim TIAA-CRE...

By George Donnelly • May 1, 2000

Blanketing Intellectual Risk

Insurance to protect intellectual property (IP) has been around for several years, but until recently, it usually offered too little for too much. Now Aon Corp., in Denver, has introduced a “risk-transfer service” that offers blanket protection of intellectual property assets.In the past, IP insu...

By John P. Mello Jr. • May 1, 2000

What Chinese Wall?

Do the research  and underwriting arms of securities firms collude to generate corporate finance business? Do analysts pull their punches to foster and preserve investment banking deals? After all, 70 percent of analyst reports carry a buy rating, but only 1 percent a sell. Or consider that analy...

By Stephen Barr • March 1, 2000

Show and Tell

James O’Donnell still isn’t sure what hit ConAgra Inc. When the Omaha-based food giant was preparing to release its third- quarter earnings last year, CFO O’Donnell invited analysts and portfolio managers to participate in a 9:00 a.m. conference call. He was eager to boast about the company’s 20 ...

By Stephen Barr • March 1, 2000