Tag Archives: governance

Some Misgivings about the End of Section 206

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2023 could see the end of Section 206, the New York LLC publication requirement. I have supported its repeal ever since I first came up against it, and I still support it, despite some misgivings. The legislation currently on the table does little to quell them.

Currently, New York Limited Liability Company law requires newly formed LLCs and LLPs to publish a notice for six successive weeks in two newspapers designated by the county clerk, “one newspaper to be printed weekly and one newspaper to be printed daily.” At the end of that period, founders have 120 days to file an affidavit of publication (and pay a $50 filing fee). Costs can run into the thousands of dollars, since local newspapers where the notices are printed — and they must be printed — effectively have a monopoly.

This part of the 1994 LLC law reads like an artifact from a bygone, pre-internet era, and it no doubt helped prop up struggling local newspapers financially even as the internet hastened their demise. It has also given rise to a professional services cottage industry.

Legislation to repeal Section 206 has been making its way at a slow crawl through the New York Senate and the Assembly since 2008. It was last referred to the Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions in January, 2022. In March of this year, the New York Bar Association came out in support of repeal. In November, the bill’s sponsors, Liz Kreuger in the Senate and Rebecca Seawright in the Assembly, both won re-election. So prospects for a repeal in the next legislative session look favorable.

The proposed amendments would not only repeal the publication requirement, but also establish something called the Department of State modernization fund. Notices would be published in an online database maintained by the Department of State; associated filing fees would go toward “the modernization and security of the Department of State’s public-facing website, and for developing alternatives to physical publication of documents.” The bill’s sponsors say it will “remove onerous and unnecessary requirements on LLCs and partnerships forming in New York state” and that online filings “will improve a citizen’s access to this information.”

The Bar Association rightly observes that LLC and LLP filing notices running in local newspapers are generally ignored. Publication costs are high; the current requirement “serves no legitimate business or economic purpose,” they write; and it creates an unjustifiable disparity, since New York corporations are not subject to the same requirement as LLCs. These are all good points, as almost anyone who has contended with the publication requirement will tell you, and 97 percent of the lawyers surveyed by the Bar Association agree.

In addition, eliminating the publication requirement will benefit the State of New York in several ways. It will likely increase business activity in New York, which will benefit the Department of State’s revenues. More companies forming and locating within the State would similarly benefit New York’s economy. As a result, this bill will likely lead to higher employment and greater tax revenue in New York. More companies with offices in New York will employ more New Yorkers, resulting in increased tax revenue to the State.

Here is where my misgivings start to kick in. It’s hard to say how “likely” any of this really is. The publication requirement is an inconvenience and a burden, but how many companies have really been deterred from forming and locating in New York because of it? When it comes to choosing between New York and Delaware, how much does Section 206 factor into the decision? Delaware LLCs and LLPs that do business in New York still have to register to do business here, pay an annual filing fee, and comply with New York tax laws. Could the repeal make New York the new Delaware? Unlikely: Delaware will still enjoy institutional advantages (namely, the Court of Chancery) and a reputation, deserved or not, as the best place to form a business and raise capital.

Maybe Delaware sets the bar too high. Will the repeal significantly increase business activity and contribute to higher employment and greater tax revenues? Look at the trend line on this US Census Bureau graph. Is the repeal of Section 206 the thing to keep it moving north? Will the upward trend accelerate once the legislation passes?

Time will tell, and some measure of skepticism seems warranted. What’s more, the repeal could have adverse consequences as well as benefits. What happens to the small, local print publications that have been practically subsidized since 1994 by LLC listings? Those local newspapers may not matter so much in New York City, where we have several daily newspapers (but I’m not sure that argument can stand much scrutiny), and protecting New York City publishers’ Section 206 interests may be outweighed by the economic benefits anticipated from the repeal. But what about in more rural counties?

Do printed daily and weekly newspapers still serve rural, or, for that matter, urban communities in other ways? Let me overdramatize just to drive the point home:

No surprise that local print publications failed to catch this brazen fraud.* It’s the rare local newspaper that can support investigative journalism or take on a newly elected member of Congress; and a Section 206 zombie newspaper probably isn’t going to be up to the job anyway. Subsidizing publishers on the back of new businesses, which is essentially what 206 does, is not the same thing as supporting local journalism. Still, it would be good to know or at least see some public discussion of what these print publications contribute to their communities before they try to set up entirely online or just fail; it would be even better to see some legislative efforts to keep local journalism alive. The LLC publication requirement cottage industry will likely disappear, too. I have more trouble shedding a tear for its demise.

Another set of questions concerns the modernization fund, its reach and its governance.

The legislation places the fund under the custody of the State Comptroller and specifies that “on the warrant of the State Comptroller” the moneys in the fund will be paid to cover modernization and security upgrades to the DOS website and development of digital alternatives to the current publication system. Moneys in this fund are “to be kept separately and not to be commingled with other moneys” in the Comptroller’s custody.

But what falls under the fuzzy heading of “modernization”? What does the firewall between modernization and other Department of State projects look like, and how will it be maintained by successive Comptrollers? Is modernization a project without end, lasting as long as the filing fees keep adding to the coffers? At bottom, my concern is that the modernization fund could, over time, turn into a consulting industry slush fund.

If it becomes law in the next legislative session, the repeal of Section 206 could do all that it promises to do: relieve founders and partnerships of a costly, bothersome requirement, improve public access to corporate records, and even deliver some limited economic benefits. It could also undermine or fail to serve the public interest in other, unanticipated ways.

*Update, 23 December: It turns out a local newspaper, The North Shore Leader, was wise to Santos’ fraud months ago. And the Leader is among the newspapers designated for publication of legal notices by the Nassau County Clerk.

This Twitter thread is also worth reading:

The Burgundy Ribbon Rule

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BurgundyRibbonsCalPERS

Another rule, and for the time being, at least, I am happy* with the wording here: an abuse of asking almost always presents an abuse of power.

Take the case of burgundy affair at the public pension fund CalPERS, as documented by Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism.

This past fall, documents obtained by Smith show, CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost “asked the CalPERS senior leadership team to wear burgundy to show their support for her” as she faced questions about representations she had made regarding her educational background before and after she was hired. Burgundy ribbons were set out in break rooms with messages urging the “Team” to wear one in a show of support. “No pressure and no problem if you do not want to do this,” the message reads, “it is completely voluntary.” Completely.

“This is obviously inappropriate,” writes Smith,

since a request made by a CEO is effectively an order. CalPERS executives and employees are civil servants, not Frost’s personal retainers. As an expert on managerial and political conduct reacted:

I don’t even know what category to put this in. A scandal-plagued boss orchestrating support by inventing gang colors and pressuring employees to wear them? What happens to the employees who don’t perform this ritual of fealty? Should they be polishing their resumés and practicing their swimming skills?

These incidents smack of underlying panic. Frost is working overtime to shore up her position as CEO in the face of fully deserved questions regarding her long history of misrepresentations about her background, which include committing perjury in Washington on a gubernatorial questionnaire. Not only is Frost pushing her subordinates far too hard to back her up, since they can only do so much for her and coercing them will diminish their good will, she is also showing a lack of a sense of professional boundaries….

Frost’s burgundy campaign may well have crossed the line into creating a hostile work environment. One senior staff member who came to the office and saw the “dress burgundy” request too late to comply issued a written apology. Similarly, when “asked” to wear burgundy to an offsite, one [employee] who wears only black and white felt compelled to buy a burgundy outfit to comply…

…word clearly got around quickly, including the notion that non-compliance was risky.

I am still fussing over the word “presents,” and I’ve considered “masks” and variations in that direction, as well as “declares,” “represents” or “signals.” That one abuse (presenting an order as a request) almost always carries the other with it — almost always, because I don’t want to get caught up right now in handling exceptions — is the essential thing.

You can read my other posts about asking here.

*Postscript: On reflection, I might prefer this much more straightforward and concrete formulation: when someone presents an order as a request, look for an abuse of power. That way, we don’t have to worry too much about motives, or figure out whether the person doing the asking is trying to get away with something. It falls to the person being asked to watch for abuse, and conduct herself accordingly. (Being asked for something, or to do something, turns the ethical spotlight on you, or at least requires you to share it with the person doing the asking. This is your moment.) In a case like the present one, and in most superior-subordinate relationships, calling out abuse may be impractical. Subordinates will bury grievances, reluctantly comply, or pretend not to have been aware of the request. The subordinate’s dilemma in this case registers a failure of governance; a failure of governance at the highest reaches makes itself manifest at even the lowest levels and in the most trivial matters (the wearing of a ribbon). More immediately, presenting orders as requests hijacks power, creates distrust (after all, we can’t help but wonder about motives), and makes people prone to dissemble. All this thwarts collaboration, or the power to do things (to act) together.

A Quibble Over Robert Reich’s “CEO” Statesman

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JDZellerbach

J.D. Zellerbach

One of the posts on this blog with consistently high traffic is The First CEO, which was my first attempt to track down the earliest instances of the acronym “CEO.” With a little help from the people at Webster’s Dictionary and the Harvard Business Review, I found that those came in the 1970s. In subsequent posts on this theme, I tried to make some historical sense of the literary evidence I’d uncovered.

So I have a quibble with Robert Reich’s polemic in The American Prospect (and elsewhere; he’s syndicated), comparing the CEOs of today and their “shameful,” self-serving silence in the face of Trumpian authoritarianism to the “CEOs” of the 1950s:

I’m old enough to recall a time when CEOs were thought of as “corporate statesman” [sic] with duties to the nation. As one prominent executive told Time Magazine in the 1950s, Americans “regard business management as a stewardship,” acting “for the benefit of all the people.”

That prominent executive, held up here as a model corporate statesman, was pulp and paper executive J. D. Zellerbach. Zellberbach was not a CEO — he could not have been in the 1950s — but the President of Crown Zellerbach. Reich is using the term “CEO” loosely, then, but in this piece that seems to prevent him from thinking historically about the CEO as an institution.

Perhaps he should have instead asked whether the institution of the CEO in the 1970s represented a rejection of “socially-conscious” business leadership for which he’s calling.

Remarkably enough, in Saving Capitalism, Reich himself quotes Zellerbach’s statement to Time Magazine just before he discusses the shift from the benevolent managerialism advocated by industrialists like Zellerbach to “a radically different vision of corporate ownership” that set in during the 1970s (and brought with it, among other things, the institution of the CEO). It’s worth reading this passage to the bitter end:

In the early 1950s, Fortune magazine urged CEOs to become “industrial statesmen,” which in many respects they did—helping to pilot an economy generating broad-based prosperity. In November 1956, Time magazine noted that business leaders were willing to “judge their actions, not only from the standpoint of profit and loss” in their financial results “but of profit and loss to the community.” General Electric, noted the magazine, famously sought to serve the “balanced best interests” of all its stakeholders. Pulp and paper executive J. D. Zellerbach told Time that “the majority of Americans support private enterprise, not as a God-given right but as the best practical means of conducting business in a free society….They regard business management as a stewardship, and they expect it to operate the economy as a public trust for the benefit of all the people.”

But a radically different vision of corporate ownership erupted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It came with corporate raiders who mounted hostile takeovers, wielding high-yield junk bonds to tempt shareholders to sell their shares. They used leveraged buyouts and undertook proxy fights against the industrial statesmen who, in their view, were depriving shareholders of the wealth that properly belonged to them. The raiders assumed that shareholders were the only legitimate owners of the corporation and that the only valid purpose of the corporation was to maximize shareholder returns.

This transformation did not happen by accident. It was a product of changes in the legal and institutional organization of corporations and of financial markets—changes that were promoted by corporate interests and Wall Street. In 1974, at the urging of pension funds, insurance companies, and the Street, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Before then, pension funds and insurance companies could only invest in high-grade corporate and government bonds—a fiduciary obligation under their contracts with beneficiaries of pensions and insurance policies. The 1974 act changed that, allowing pension funds and insurance companies to invest their portfolios in the stock market and thereby making a huge pool of capital available to Wall Street. In 1982, another large pool of capital became available when Congress gave savings and loan banks, the bedrocks of local home mortgage markets, permission to invest their deposits in a wide range of financial products, including junk bonds and other risky ventures promising high returns. The convenient fact that the government insured savings and loan deposits against losses made these investments all the more tempting (and ultimately cost taxpayers some $124 billion when many of the banks went bust). Meanwhile, the Reagan administration loosened other banking and financial regulations and simultaneously cut the enforcement staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

All this made it possible for corporate raiders to get the capital and the regulatory approvals necessary to mount unfriendly takeovers. During the whole of the 1970s there had been only 13 hostile takeovers of companies valued at $1 billion or more. During the 1980s, there were 150. Between 1979 and 1989, financial entrepreneurs mounted more than 2,000 leveraged buyouts, each over $250 million. (The party was temporarily halted only when raider Ivan Boesky agreed to be a government informer as part of his plea bargain on charges of insider trading and market manipulation. Boesky implicated Michael Milken and Milken’s junk bond powerhouse, Drexel Burnham Lambert, in a scheme to manipulate stock prices and defraud clients. Drexel pleaded guilty. Milken was indicted on ninety-eight counts, including insider trading and racketeering, and went to jail.)

Even where raids did not occur, CEOs nonetheless felt pressured to maximize shareholder returns for fear their firms might otherwise be targeted. Hence, they began to see their primary role as driving up share prices.

Another Note on the Boundary Waters Reversal

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Jorjani Calendar

A 25 July 2017 entry from Daniel Jorjani’s calendar shows a meeting with Antofagasta Plc on the Twin Metals project.

One point I hoped to get across in Monday’s post about the Boundary Waters reversal has to do with journalism, or, more broadly, with storytelling. Just to highlight: scandal-mongering that generates clicks doesn’t necessarily get at the more prosaic and more complex truth of the story, and may end up doing a disservice. In the case of the Boundary Waters reversal, it is tempting to focus on the story of Chilean billionaire Andronico Luksic Craig and his Washington, D.C. tenants, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Was Luksic Craig’s purchase of the mansion where Jared and Ivanka now live an opening bid? Was the reversal connected to the rental?

This story of the rich and famous still merits investigating, but it carries with it a whole set of ideas — exaggerated and somewhat cartoonish ideas — of what corruption looks like: foreign billionaires, mansions, nepotism, winks and nods (remember what Luksic Craig said about meeting Trump at the Patriots’ game: “lo saludé.” “I said ‘hi’”).  All of those elements are certainly in play here, and they are part of what makes this administration appear so unabashedly corrupt and downright villainous.

At the same time, the story of Luksic Craig and his D.C. tenants could turn out to be a red herring, or what nowadays people call a nothingburger or fake news. Besides, there’s another, more immediately credible story that’s just there for the telling. What it lacks in tabloid glamour it makes up for with evidence. It unfolds among the banalities of meeting rooms, conference calls, memos, and after work events. This is the story Jimmy Tobias pursues in an excellent piece in the Pacific Standard, which I had not read before writing my post (and which, after reading, I linked to in a postscript).

Tobias beat me to the punch on the FOIA request, and obtained Principal Deputy Solicitor Daniel Jorjani’s calendar from May through December of 2017. He identifies two meetings about the Twin Metals project. The first is on June 14, 2017, with Raya Treiser and Andy Spielman of WilmerHale, the law and lobbying firm, on behalf of Antofagasta Plc.

Spielman is the Chair of WilmerHale’s Energy, Environment and Natural Resources Practice, and his name appears on the calendar heading, so we know that this is a high priority matter for the lobbying firm and presumably for the Department of Interior. And Treiser comes directly from the Department of the Interior, where she served under President Obama. She helped to “streamline” permitting on large infrastructure projects, and worked on the reform of offshore drilling regulations and energy development in Alaska. Now, as her biography on the WilmerHale site informs us, she has “successfully leveraged her substantive knowledge and insight into government processes.”

The second meeting is directly with Antofagasta Plc: the Chilean mining company comes to the Department of Interior to discuss its Minnesota claim, and it appears the Department rolls out the red carpet. WilmerHale had done its work. In addition to Principal Deputy Solicitor Jorjani, thirteen administration officials are in attendance, representing the highest reaches of the Department of Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Environmental and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice. As Tobias notes, no conservation groups were invited to discuss the reversal with the Department of Interior. This was a conversation for insiders only.

At the center of this story is not a mansion, but a revolving door (and if you are not familiar with Bill Moyers’ short video essay on the subject, you should be). This feature of the story becomes even more apparent when we look at a couple of other meetings on Deputy Solicitor Jorjani’s calendar that Tobias didn’t flag but are connected with the Boundary Waters reversal. One is a Friday, May 26 call with Rachel Jacobson of WilmerHale, regarding a “DC Bar Event”; this call or this event might well have provided an opportunity to tee up the Twin Metals issue. It is the first contact WilmerHale makes with Principal Deputy Solicitor Jorjani— and who should they choose for that task but Jacobson, who held Jorjani’s job of Principal Deputy Solicitor under the Obama administration.

Then on Thursday, September 7th, when work on the reversal memo is presumably well underway, there is an internal meeting on Twin Metals: Jorjani with Jack Haugrud, who was Acting Secretary of the Interior until Zinke’s appointment, and Joshua Campbell, an Advisor to the Office of the Solicitor. Campbell is profiled here, on Western Values Project “Department of Influence” site, documenting the revolving door between special interests and the Department of Interior.

In these meetings, the public interest does not even come into play.

Postscript: Today, as I was writing this post, the Washington Post reported that the Forest Service will cancel a planned environmental impact study and instead conduct an abbreviated review of the Obama-era proposal to withdraw the Superior National Forest lands near the Boundary Waters from minerals exploration for up to 20 years. The story also appears in the Star Tribune. Things are moving fast now, and pressure is mounting.

Mozambique, Michigan, and the SEC Complaint Against Rio Tinto

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Chinde_Rusting_boats

Rusting boats at the port of Chinde, where Rio Tinto proposed to barge Riversdale coal via the Zambezi River.

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought a complaint in New York City against Rio Tinto, charging Tom Albanese, the former CEO of Rio Tinto, and Guy Elliott, his Chief Financial Officer, with fraud. According to the complaint, Albanese and Elliott actively misled the Rio Tinto board, audit committee, auditors, and the investing public about their acquisition of the Riversdale coal business in Mozambique in 2011.

The fraud that Albanese and Elliott are accused of perpetrating looks awfully familiar to those who have followed the development of Eagle Mine and the controversy over County Road 595. Having noticed the parallel between Mozambique and Michigan back in 2013, when Tom Albanese was forced to step down, I now have to wonder whether prosecutors will take the company’s representations around the Eagle Mine into account when building their case.

In Mozambique, they told investors, coal would be transported by barge to the Indian Ocean port of Chinde. Although their technical advisors “highlighted the ‘showstopping’ risks” associated with the barging proposals before the acquisition, Albanese and Elliott blundered recklessly ahead. Then eight months later, the Mozambique government denied Rio Tinto a permit to transport the coal by barge down the Zambezi River. Suddenly, the coal business they had acquired for $3.7 billion appeared to be worth a negative $680 million. According to the SEC’s complaint, Albanese and Elliott “concealed and glossed over” the fact that they had no viable haul route for the 30 million tons per year they projected in their business plans, and misled investors as they raised $5.5 billion in US debt offerings.

In that very same period, Rio Tinto was also promoting Eagle Mine to investors and promising economic renewal in the Upper Peninsula, though they had not yet secured a transportation route — a haul route — for Eagle’s sulfide ore. In Michigan, it appears, the company took the same cavalier attitude toward planning and risk that the SEC complaint says got them into trouble in Mozambique.

Way back in 2005, John Cherry, who was then a Kennecott Minerals project manager and is now President and CEO of the Polymet project in Minnesota, characterized Eagle as a “direct ship” operation, “meaning that the rock would not be processed on site, thereby avoiding the storage of highly toxic debris left over, called tailings.” Presumably this is what Michigan DEQ’s Robert McCann had in mind in 2007, when he told The Blade that Kennecott’s permit “would require them to keep the ores underground, put them in covered rail cars, and ship them to Ontario for processing”; the Marquette Monthly told roughly the same story that year, only now there were trucks in the picture: “ore would be transported by truck and rail to a processing site in Ontario.” This seems to have been nothing more than a cover story.

Everything changed in 2008, when Rio Tinto bought the Humboldt Mill. Those permit requirements the DEQ’s McCann touted back in 2005? They were quickly abandoned. Covered rail cars come into the picture only after the ore is crushed, ground into a slurry, floated and rendered into concentrate at Humboldt Mill. A glossy 2010 company publication promoting Eagle Mine includes not a single word about how Rio Tinto and Kennecott plan to travel the 30 kilometers from mine to mill: “Happily, processing of the nickel and copper can take place in Humboldt, around 30 kilometres [sic] away, at a previously abandoned iron ore plant.” By 2011, the company had “considered more than a half dozen transportation routes” from mine to mill, according to a Marquette Mining Journal article by John Pepin published in February of that year, but they still had no viable haul route.

A good prosecutor with a rigorous and thorough discovery process would probably be able to determine whether the evasions and misrepresentations perpetuated on the public over the Eagle Mine haul route also amounted to fraud, or were part of a larger pattern of deliberately misleading statements. It’s clear Rio Tinto never came clean — and perhaps never really had a firm plan — on mine to mill transport at Eagle before it sold the works to Lundin Mining in June of 2013 and decamped. As long as regulators in Michigan continued to be more accommodating than those in Mozambique, the company seems to have been content to let the people of Marquette County fight out the haul route issue among themselves.

Three Questions for the Michigan DEQ on the Back Forty Project

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Earlier this month, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality announced its intention to permit the Back Forty Project, an open-pit gold and zinc sulfide ore mine that Aquila Resources, a Canadian company, plans to develop near the headwaters of the Menominee River. In response to the MDEQ’s request for public comment by November 3rd, I’ve submitted these three questions. I’m posting them here so that others might consider them in the run up to the public meeting with the MDEQ in Stephenson, Michigan on October 6th.

  1. In determining that the Back Forty Project application meets the requirements for approval under Part 632, did MDEQ take into account the cumulative effects of sulfide mining throughout the Lake Superior watershed? We know that the Back Forty project poses a significant risk to the Menominee River all by itself. With the mine in close proximity to the river, a flood, berm collapse, subsidence or a slide could destroy the Menominee River; to answer these serious concerns by asking the company to add a “synthetic, manmade liner under their waste/tailing rock facility,” as the DEQ has proposed, is to trivialize them. Other development that the mine will inevitably bring, including haul routes, power lines, lights, fueling stations, exhaust and machine noise, will leave a large industrial footprint and disturb the Menominee River and its environs in countless ways. At the same time, this mine will heighten the risk, in the long term, of large-scale environmental destruction posed by the resurgence of sulfide mining not just in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but in Minnesota and Canada as well — all around the lake and throughout the Lake Superior watershed. Has the DEQ completed or participated with neighboring state agencies and tribal authorities in a scientific study of the cumulative impacts of sulfide mining around Lake Superior? Has the DEQ issued guidance on how cumulative environmental effects should factor into its decision-making process for permitting new mines in Michigan?

  2. Has MDEQ made any determination about the human rights implications of its decision to allow the Back Forty project to go forward? Human rights are not outside the DEQ’s bailiwick, no matter how hard it may try to exempt itself. Witness Flint. In the present case, the DEQ’s oversight is inextricably bound up with the state’s obligation to protect human rights abuses by third parties. Aquila’s Back Forty project is sure to disturb, and likely to desecrate, lands traditionally belonging to the Menominee and still held sacred by them; and making provisions for archaeological recovery and preservation of mounds and other sacred sites does not adequately address the basic human rights issues involved here. The headwaters of the Menominee River are central to the tribe’s creation story, marking the place where the Menominee people originated. Their very name derives from manoomin, or wild rice, which will not survive changes in sulfate levels or degradation of overall water quality. As tribal member Guy Reiter has said, “It’s no different than if an open-pit sulfide mine was put in Bethlehem for the Christians.” Seen from this perspective, the Back Forty is not only an affront to Menominee history; it also puts the cultural survival of the Menominee people at risk. How will the DEQ factor such human rights considerations into its decision-making process?

  3. What has the DEQ done to restore trust in its authority, and reassure the Menominee and people living downstream from the Back Forty project in Michigan and Wisconsin that it will exercise appropriate care? The Flint water crisis cast a long shadow, and reinforced the perception that “politics and poverty are big factors” in DEQ decision making. “The same attitude of disregard for citizens and the environment has repeated itself in DEQ decisions across our state for well over a decade,” said Marquette attorney Michelle Halley after news of the Flint water crisis broke; controversy over the renewed Groundwater Discharge Permit issued by MDEQ at Eagle Mine and legitimate concerns about lax oversight at Eagle East help make her case. Like all government agencies, the Michigan DEQ should operate in sunlight. Already, however, troubling questions have been raised about the transparency of the Back Forty permitting process. For example, Al Gedicks, Executive Secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council, asks why the DEQ appears to be in a “rush” to grant the Back Forty permit. So as things now stand, the DEQ enjoys de jure authority in Michigan under Part 632, but it is unclear whether the DEQ still enjoys de facto authority, which could only derive from demonstrations of regulatory competence. How does MDEQ intend to quell public concern that it is compromised or incompetent, and reassure the public that it is a responsible steward?

Five Questions On Business And Society

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Dow Chemical is currently soliciting questions for a Google Hangout on “Redefining the Role of Business In Society.” The Wednesday morning Hangout will be moderated by Alice Korngold, author of A Better World Inc., and feature Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris along with other “global sustainability leaders.”

I submitted five questions for the group’s consideration. I can’t say whether they’ll address any of them or whether these questions are even appropriate for this forum. This is a huge topic, and there are lots of ways to approach it. Nor do I pretend that these are the only five questions worth asking. But it strikes me that these five simple questions might help others start and structure a conversation about business’s role in society. So, after tweeting my questions and putting them up for easy reference on Google docs, I thought I’d post them here as well.

  1. Governance: Where’s the seat for “society” in the boardroom, and who sits there?
  2. Priorities: Whose role is it within the company to identify and set social priorities?
  3. Non-performance: What mechanisms should be in place to identify and address human rights and environmental grievances?
  4. Authentic social license: What mechanisms ensure all stakeholders — esp. dissenters, skeptics, opponents — are represented?
  5. Metrics: How does [the company; in this case, Dow] currently measure social performance, and factor it into overall business performance?

Sustainable Development, Derailed

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train-derailment-sept-ilesOn Thursday of last week, an avalanche derailed a Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway freight train owned by Iron Ore of Canada as it made its way north along the banks of the Moisie River.

Divers recovered the body of Enrick Gagnon, the train’s engineer,  just this morning. The train’s lead locomotive is still completely submerged in the Moisie and another is partly submerged. Each locomotive holds about 17,000 litres of diesel fuel, and a 20 kilometer slick — “a silvery layer” — has spread over surface of the Moisie. The train was not hauling ore; its freight compartments were empty for its northbound run.

The Moisie and its watershed are part of a designated aquatic reserve, so the river is technically protected from mining activity; but so far as I can tell, the 16 mile stretch that the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway line runs along the Moisie was built in 1954, when mining first began in the region, and more than fifty years before the Quebec government published its conservation plan.

One stated aim of that plan is to protect native species, including and perhaps especially the Atlantic salmon running in the Moisie. As nearly every report on the Moisie catastrophe notes, the pristine waters of the remote northern river are internationally renowned for salmon fishing.

For the Innu of Uashat mak Mani-utenam, whose traditional territory the Moisie crosses, the river is much more: it is, in the words of one newswire report, a thing of “inestimable cultural value.”  So development in Innu territory continues to risk the inestimable for the merely estimable: in this case iron ore, jobs, growth. The Innu, who call themselves “the true owners of the land,” say they never consented to the tradeoff, and that the mining operation in their territory violates “international law, particularly the principle of ‘free, prior and informed consent.’”

Now, with this trainwreck, the Innu have an environmental crisis on their hands; but over the past couple of decades, the Innu say, they have also witnessed a gradual and “cumulative” effect on the environment and their community due to “the intensification of industrial activities” in the Sept-Îles region.

Iron Ore of Canada has a lock on the region’s economy, and development opportunities in the Labrador Trough are, in the words of IOC’s CEO Zoe Yujnovich, “potentially unconstrained.” Rio Tinto, which owns the majority stake in IOC, recently increased annual production capacity for the region from 18 to 23 million tons of ore concentrate, and plans to open a new mine called Wabush 3 to help meet that goal.

A 2013 publication touting Rio Tinto’s “Sustainable Development” plan for the region notes that the additional revenue generated by IOC’s “wholly owned rail company” will keep pace with growth: “use of the railway is set to increase significantly in the next few years as a result of our own expansion projects and junior mining startups in the area.” In other words, more trains than ever will be traveling along the Moisie, from Labrador to Sept-Îles Junction.

Where Are the Women in Mining?

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Glencore remains the only FTSE 100 company that does not have a woman on its board of directors. At the shareholder’s meeting at the start of this week, Chairman Tony Hayward promised that the company would remedy the situation by year’s end; but some big institutional investors have grown impatient, and UK business secretary Vince Cable said “it is simply not credible that one company cannot find any suitable women.”

The problem is industry-wide. A 2013 report by Amanda van Dyke (of Palisade Capital and Chair of the organization Women in Mining) and Stephney Dallmann (of PwC) found that mining companies “have the lowest number of women on boards of any listed industry group in the world.”

Maybe that doesn’t come as a great surprise to those familiar with mining, but within the industry there are companies who seem to be doing more than bluffing or hoping the issue will go away. Most of those are high profile global players. Women’s numbers decline steadily as we move down the ranks to the so-called juniors; and the likelihood that women will have a board seat or participate in a board committee also varies by territory. (South Africa leads the pack: over 21% of the committee seats of listed South African mining companies are occupied by women.)

Canada boasts the highest number of listed mining companies, and the “large mining companies in Canada are much further down the road [than smaller firms] in terms of their understanding of the importance of the role women play on boards.” The top-tier Canadian companies with high market capitalization (and the increased visibility that comes with size) have nearly 14% of board directorships held by women, but among the bottom 400 of the world’s top 500 miners, Canada has “the lowest participation on board committees by women, at 5.9%.”

The authors acknowledge that many of these companies are at early stages of development and they have only a few board seats to fill; but if they expect to grow and mature (as they do), there is no time like the present to lead or at least follow the lead of the big league players. When the same men keep winning the game of musical chairs — and when they sit next to each other (as they do) not just on one board, but on several, and their affiliations stretch back over decades — the result is likely to be not just over-familiarity but insularity, both of which are likely to impair and impede judgment. Meetings become a day at the club; the boardroom becomes an echo chamber.

As van Dyke and Dallmann note in a 2014 follow up report, it’s misleading to say, as many mining company executives do when pressed, that the small number of women directors correlates in a meaningful way with the lack of women with mining-related degrees. Only 32% of men on boards of mining companies have an engineering degree. So “there is no shortage of women in the talent pool;” according to van Dyke and Dallmann, “there is simply a perception of a lack of available female talent.”

This blinkered view of reality has real-world consequences, for shareholders and stakeholders in the communities where the miners operate. Mining companies with women on their boards see performance improvements on a number of fronts, from financial to social and environmental performance. “Sustainability” — as measured by water use, Bloomberg ESG score, UN Global Compact participation, Community Spend, and CSR or Sustainability Committee — improves across the board. For example, average total water use by mining companies “decreases steadily with an increase of women” in director roles — though it’s not entirely clear to me why that should be so — and “the amount [mining] companies spend on community projects and initiatives increases with the number of women on the board.” The authors are careful not to urge any hasty conclusions, but after surveying the data they are compelled to suggest that “the security of a company’s social licence to operate may be improved by having women on the board.”

I would go one step further: it’s difficult to countenance a mining company asking for social license to operate even as it deliberately insulates itself from social reality.

What’s Mozambique to Michigan?

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Tom Albanese has stepped down from his position as CEO of Rio Tinto, after the mining giant announced a $14 billion dollar writedown. While most of those losses were connected with Alcan, the aluminum business, the company also lost $3 billion on a coal project in Mozambique. That’s by far the more interesting aspect of the story, and it’s one that deserves attention not just from investors, industry analysts and Africa watchers, but also from those (like me) with an eye on the company’s operations around Lake Superior, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Here’s how it all went down in Mozambique. A couple of years ago, Rio Tinto acquired Australian-based Riversdale Mining for $4 billion. Riversdale had a number of coal projects going in Mozambique near Tete, “the coal capital of the world.” Logistics – moving coal in significant quantities from the mines in the Moatize Basin – was a challenge. Some coal mined at Benga could move by rail, pending “final approval by government authorities.” Still, that was only a partial solution; “long term logistics,” as a Rio Tinto presentation [pdf] put it, would be required once the Zambeze and Tete East projects were in full swing.

The company proposed moving Zambeze coal by barge on the Zambezi River. Barges would travel from Tete to the port of Chinde, on the Indian Ocean. The promised solution would not only make the coal business boom in Mozambique; it would also allow for “future growth” and “provide a catalyst for further socio-economic development in [the] region.” The company sought approval for its Zambeze River project by autumn of 2011 and planned to start coal barging by 2014.

All very well, except the Mozambique authorities never approved the transport of coal on the Zambezi.

How could the Mozambique authorities refuse Rio Tinto? After all, the company’s own Environmental Impact Report showed that coal-barging on the Zambezi would have no “significant” environmental effects.

Mozambique Transport Minister Paulo Zucula saw things differently: “the impact was seen to be very negative, and there were no plans for mitigation. As proposed it is not doable,” he said. Barging would adversely affect the river’s fish and dredging would increase the likelihood of floods: “every four years we have problems with flooding and killing people. So if you’re going to dredge the river, expand the banks, we will be in trouble.”

Zucula suggested Rio Tinto move its coal by rail. He has championed the construction of a new railway line from Moatize to the port of Nacala, and helped secure a $500 million investment in the $1.5 billion project from the Dutch government and the European Union. So Zucula may not have been solely concerned with the fate of the Zambezi’s fish or the people living along its banks. But the purity of Zucula’s motives is really not at issue. The issue is that Rio Tinto seriously miscalculated and overplayed its hand in Mozambique.

A blogger in the Financial Times today sees here “a useful lesson for other mega-project investors in emerging markets.” He doesn’t say what that useful lesson is. I’m certain it’s something more than the need for prudence, and that it extends beyond emerging markets. It has to do with overconfidence – hubris, even: “Rio knew what the challenge was. It just couldn’t find an effective answer.” And yet, it forged ahead, certain that it would prevail upon the authorities in Mozambique to see things its way. That was just plain arrogant.

Sam Walsh, the new CEO of Rio Tinto, should take this $3 billion lesson in humility to heart. At the very least, he and the board of directors might ask whether the company’s failures in Mozambique are the outcome of behaviors that are in evidence elsewhere.

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the company is developing the Eagle Mine, it faces a set of challenges of the same kind if not of the same magnitude as those it faced in Mozambique. The mine is being built on a site sacred to Native Americans and will be situated in the heart of the Yellow Dog Watershed, which feeds into Lake Superior. The company has run roughshod over Native American claims and issued familiar and predictable assurances that it will be a responsible steward of the environment – whatever that means when you’re extracting sulfide ore in the middle of a fragile watershed ecosystem. As for logistics, Rio Tinto was banking on the approval and construction of County Road 595, despite local opposition and concern from environmental regulators, just as it banked on the approval of the barge plan in Mozambique.

What could possibly go wrong? Rio Tinto had big Michigan politicians on its side: Debbie Stabinow, Dan Benishek, Rick Snyder, Matt Huuki. Even the Romney campaign was for County Road 595. But the EPA along with local environmental groups objected. After much wrangling, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality denied the wetlands fill permit for the new road just a couple of weeks ago, on January 3rd: the road did not meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act. Rio Tinto has now had to shift financial support from this $82 million project to improving and upgrading existing roads. It’s as if the company’s blunder in Mozambique found a faint but telling echo in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.