Taking stock

London Stock Exchange Group is feeling optimistic about its prospects for flotations in the coming year, The Times reports.

The confidence was revealed in a results press conference, in which chief executive David Schwimmer told reporters that pre-tax profits were up 10.3% to £2.97bn.

But the attention was on Schwimmer’s comments about IPOs. Last year was not a good year for the London Stock Exchange but he said: “I still feel comfortable with the pipeline. We see a number of companies in preparatory mode and evaluating their plans.”

That sounds good. Let’s hope the evaluations turn into firm commitments. They wouldn’t go amiss.

On regard duty

Good news if you want to get a merger through: the Competition and Markets Authority says some global deals will go ahead without review by its watchdogs.

The Financial Times reports CMA chief executive Sarah Cardell telling a conference that some big deals may go uninspected, though it will not be “open season” for mergers that could threaten consumers.

The CMA is responding to guidance from government that it should work to help growth and avoid duplication of work undertaken by other regulators.

Cardell is quoted as saying: “I think at the margins there will be perhaps a handful of global deals that we would have looked at previously that perhaps we decide we don’t need to look at.”

Merger surge

Speaking of deals, academics have turned up some surprising news.

Jeffrey Gordon of Columbia University in New York has looked at US M&A market data from more than a hundred years to find there are more deals going on over the past few decades than ever before. Why?

“This pattern can be explained at least in part by the introduction of an internal driver of M&A activity, the ‘golden parachute’, a super-bonus payoff to a target CEO,” he writes.

Gordon adds, acidly: “They now provide a CEO with a high-powered incentive to become a target CEO, compensating the CEO like a deal-hunting investment banker, and thus have changed the pattern of M&S activity.”

No punches pulled there; the golden gloves are off.

Crooked line

Let’s end on a word of warning. For those of you who didn’t notice: among the avalanche of executive orders issued by Donald Trump was one “pausing” enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

This is the law that says US companies cannot bribe foreign officials to win business. It still stands, but enforcers will be standing on the sidelines doing nothing for the time being.

Some have worried that this could cause other countries to weaken their bribery laws.

However, the Institute of Business Ethics warns that we shouldn’t be thinking of bribery merely in terms of legal compliance.

A blog from IBE says that “rather than viewing anti-bribery and corruption solely as a legal risk that disappears when the rules change, the best ethical leaders consider enduring principles and imagine future scenarios from here and the benefits and risks of long-term commitment to fair competition, transparency and political.”

Or, as we like to say, bribery is just wrong and, in the long run, is bad for business.