ISS Updates Compliance with AMF Recommendation No. 2011-06 of 18 March 2011 on Proxy Advisory Firms

In 2011 the French financial market regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers (known as the AMF), issued a Recommendation prescribing certain best practices for proxy advisors with respect to their coverage of, and dealings with, French public companies. 

Under the third section of its Recommendation ('Communicating with listed companies'), the AMF recommends that"the proxy advisor send the company in question its final analysis report as early as possible, and at the same time as it is submitted to customers".

ISS’ aim is to comply with the spirit of the AMF Recommendation without compromising its level of client service to investors. In March 2012, as an adjunct to its Engagement and Draft Report Disclosure Policy for the French market, ISS has now given French issuers free direct web-based access to ISS' final reports as soon as they become available on ISS' platform Governance Analytics. This direct access has initially been given to issuers in the SBF120 index, with plans to extend this to all French issuers in the future.

ISS has always provided any French company in its research coverage with a free copy of its final analysis report on request. This additional web-based initiative will make the process even more straightforward.

How can an issuer be granted access to Governance Analytics?

To get started, the issuer will need a user name and password. To request a username and password, please email our European support desk at support-europe@isscorporateservices.com or call + 44 (20) 7618-2291.The user name and password will be sent via e-mail, generally within a few hours. Once you have a username, you can enter your user name and password on the Governance Analytics log-in screen at https://ga.isscorporateservices.com/login.php. Once logged in go to the “My Company” menu on the far right side of the screen and click “Historic Proxy Analyses”. Any published ISS proxy analyses for the current year and the past several years will then be displayed and available in both html and pdf format.

Information requested to get the access to Governance Analytics will be used solely for the purpose of allowing access to final reports as outlined in the process above and will not be shared with any third parties or ISS affiliates.

Proxy advisory reports are copyrighted works which are the valuable intellectual property of ISS. Any disclosure of our final research reports to issuers, whether in France or elsewhere, is made on the condition of strict confidentiality and under no circumstances is an issuer to publish or otherwise disseminate all or part of the report.  We reserve the right to withhold disclosure in future years to an issuer which fails to observe this obligation of confidentiality, notwithstanding that the conditions for disclosure prescribed by the AMF Recommendation may have been met.