By Cydney Posner

There has been a fair amount of interest in whether the proxy access provisions will remain in the Dodd corporate reform bill currently being debated in Congress. An article in the Washington Post discusses the pressure on Congress to eliminate the provision from a variety of CEOs and others.  While a regulation permitting proxy access is currently under consideration by the SEC, the provision in the proposed legislation would bolster the SEC's authority to implement proxy access, sometimes argued to be more properly the province of the states. The article notes that Senators Carper (D-Del.) and Corker (R-Tenn.) have introduced amendments that would eliminate proxy access from the bill, but suggests that "they may never come to a vote, given that there are more than 250 other proposed amendments and many will not be considered." Lobbyists against proxy access have indicated that they have also received sympathetic hearings from some Democratic Senators, including Warner (Va), Bayh (Ind.) and Kaufman (also from Delaware, which has an obvious interest in keeping the matter a question of state law).

 

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