By: Bryce Tingle
PDF Version: A ‘Victimless’ Crime Just Lost its Perpetrators
Case Commented On: Walton v. Alberta (Securities Commission), 2014 ABCA 273
In Walton v. Alberta (Securities Commission), 2014 ABCA 273 (the “Eveready” decision), the Alberta Court of Appeal has just decided the most important insider trading case in recent memory. It may also be the last insider trading case for a long time.
By: Bryce Tingle
PDF Version: The Quiet Decline of Canada’s IPO Markets
The Toronto Stock Exchange’s parent company has been travelling the country raising the profile of its new venture, TSX Private Markets. At the same time, Canada’s securities commissions are engaged in the most comprehensive overhaul of the private placement regime in more than a decade. In Ontario, in particular, this would reverse the increasingly restrictive trends of previous reforms and liberalize its private capital markets.
This is a curious state of affairs. The TSX is chipping away at the incentives for a company to go public and the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) is making it easier for companies to raise money outside of its regulatory “gold standard”: the public company prospectus system. What is going on?
PDF version: Empty Voting
Cases Considered: TELUS Corporation v Mason Capital Management LLC, 2012 BCCA 403 and Mason Capital Management LLC v TELUS Corporation, 2012 BCSC 1582
The most talked about Canadian corporate legal decision this year has been a British Columbia Supreme Court judgment in relation to TELUS’ attempt to convert a class of non-voting shares into voting shares. It was not even the ruling that had everyone talking, but several paragraphs of obiter near the end of the decision. The obiter concerned the phenomenon of “empty voting” and it was deemed sufficiently newsworthy to be reported in the national newspapers and discussed in legal blogs and articles on both sides of the border.
