Aon has reached an agreement to buy Willis Towers Watson for about $30 billion in an all-stock deal, the companies announced...

If current trends hold, eventually stock-retention requirements for CEOs may be almost as universal as equity ownership requirements...

Might the investment bank's new policy to avoid IPOs of companies without at least one diverse board member not be quite as good as it looks? David McCann Goldman Sachs has gotten plenty of ink since last week, after CEO David Solomon said in Davos, Switzerland, that the investment bank won’t take a company public unless it has at least one woman or person of color on its board of directors. Most of the ink was positive . But there were exceptions that provided food for thought...

Across the globe, a record 147 investors (up from 131 in 2018) launched new activist campaigns in 2019, including 43 “first-timers” with no prior activism history, according to Lazard’s annual shareholder activism review...

Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand Sold to Joint Venture in $4.6B Deal MGM Resorts will lease both properties for an initial rent of $292 million. MGM Resorts International is selling Las Vegas properties MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay to a joint venture in a deal valuing the properties at $4.6 billion, the companies said. The joint venture includes investment firm Blackstone Group and real estate investment trust MGM Growth Properties...

Activist investor Third Point has agreed to pay more than $600,000 to settle charges that three funds it controls failed to obtain antitrust clearance before acquiring stock in DowDuPont...

Tax on Nonprofits Could Snare Companies, Too A new excise tax on executive pay at tax-exempt entities may also apply to their affiliated for-profit companies, IRS guidance suggests. David McCann Companies with affiliated tax-exempt entities could find themselves surprised to be on the hook for a new tax, in light of interim guidance recently released by the Internal Revenue Service.

Earlier this month, the SEC and the former CEO of Jumio — a defunct, privately held mobile payments verification startup — agreed to settle fraud charges related to the overstatement of revenue. Executives of private companies should regard the case, and other recent ones like it, as warnings...

Unlike every other SEC-required disclosure, the CEO pay ratio may be reported absent any context whatsoever. All that’s required is the ratio itself, such as “300:1.” “It’s very bizarre,” Georgiev tells CFO . That’s particularly so, he points out, for a couple of reasons...