Corporate Governance

For the first time in Samsung Electronics' 57-year history, the company's two co-CEOs sent separate, division-specific anniversary messages instead of a single unified message: Jun Young-hyun to the chip-making Device Solutions (DS) division and Roh Tae-moon to the Device eXperience (DX) smartphone/TV division. The split followed record Q3 2026 results in which DS earned 106.5 trillion won while DX posted an 800 billion won loss, its second straight quarterly loss. DS employees expect bonuses of roughly 750 million won each versus about 6 million won in treasury shares for DX employees, a roughly 125:1 gap. The Samsung Electronics Labor Union (SELU) called the separate messaging 'a divide-and-conquer move that entrenches the pay gap' and said it weakens organizational communication; Samsung said performance differences between divisions made a unified message impractical.

The Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority ordered a Section 166 skilled-person review of Revolut's internal controls for approving new products, following similar concerns previously raised by the European Central Bank, which had restricted Revolut's growth in 2025 over deficiencies in its new-product approval process. The order lands as Revolut, newly granted its full UK banking licence, pushes into unsecured personal loans and private-market investment products. CEO Nik Storonsky has urged staff to operate like 'self-guided missiles' with limited oversight when building new products.

Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation and Carry the Kettle Nakoda Nation publicly objected to Bell Canada's planned AI data centre south of Regina, Saskatchewan, saying the project proceeded without their consent or consultation on land they consider unceded traditional Dakota territory and under Treaty 4 rights. Standing Buffalo gave Bell 10 business days to acknowledge a formal letter and 30 days to arrange a meeting, warning it would pursue litigation or judicial review otherwise; it is already in federal court over a separate consultation dispute. Carry the Kettle's chief called the project 'beyond irresponsible' given limited local water supplies and the community's reliance on cattle, and both nations raised concerns about water, wildlife, crops, and disposal of e-waste from retired computing equipment. Bell said it 'remains committed to engaging with local communities and First Nations' and that the project complies with applicable regulatory and environmental requirements.

After wage talks broke down at Naver Z (Naver's metaverse subsidiary, maker of Zepeto) with management proposing a salary freeze and cutting incentives to one-tenth of prior levels, the Naver Union formally demanded integrated bargaining covering all 15 Naver affiliated corporations, arguing Naver exercises real control over affiliates through full ownership stakes, shared administration, and personnel authority. Naver responded that it is not the practical employer of affiliate workers. On October 2, 2026 the union filed what it said was the IT industry's first legal action under the amended Trade Union Act ('Yellow Envelope Act') with the Gyeonggi Regional Labor Relations Commission, seeking a ruling that Naver must join the bargaining as a joint employer.

As Flipkart's IPO remained repeatedly delayed, the company's July 2026 ESOP buyback program (at a $38B valuation) was offered only to current employees, excluding former staff who collectively hold roughly half of the ~$4 billion in outstanding vested options. On October 1, 2026, at least eight former senior executives (including ex-Myntra CEO Mukesh Bansal, former CFO Sanjay Baweja, and former CTOs Amod Malviya and Ravi Garikipati) wrote to Walmart's board seeking equal liquidity treatment. By October 10-11, over 1,000 former employees from Flipkart, Myntra, Cleartrip, Shopsy, Supermoney and ANS Commerce had submitted a collective appeal, part of a campaign aiming to mobilize an estimated 20,000-30,000 former staff, demanding the company delink option liquidity from the IPO timeline and extend post-exit exercise windows.

Kakao's labor union (Kakao branch of the Korean Chemical, Food and Allied Industry Workers' Union) protested outside the Seoul High Court on September 23, 2026 against the company's planned corporate split into Kakao X (a surviving entity for investment and portfolio management, absorbing Kakao Investment) and Kakao AI (a new entity for AI services). The union said the restructuring plan lacked sufficient guarantees for employment succession and working conditions for affected staff. A shareholder campaign to block the merger by gathering 20% opposition fell short at roughly 2%, allowing management to proceed via board resolution; the union has since shifted to a public-opinion campaign.

In early September 2026, Sea Limited sent Singapore-based employees an internal memo stating that starting with October 2026 payroll, MariBank (Sea's own digital bank) would be the mandatory salary-crediting bank, offering a S$100 Shopee voucher to those who updated their bank details by September 17. Employment lawyers noted Singapore employers cannot legally require staff to receive salary through a specific bank absent a contractual provision, and Singapore's Ministry of Manpower said employers must pay salaries in full and on time and should engage employees on payment options rather than mandate them. Sea later said employees with personal circumstances could seek exceptions via HR, but the initial messaging created a coercive impression and raised conflict-of-interest concerns given the policy funneled staff finances to a Sea-owned financial product.

Ola Electric's payments to Krutrim AI, a separate company owned by its own founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, rose roughly fourfold to about Rs 100 crore in FY26 even as the company's overall expenses fell by nearly half, including about Rs 46 crore in advance payments for services not yet invoiced. Corporate governance experts flagged the transaction for scrutiny given board overlap between the two entities and questioned whether the arrangement met the arm's-length and independent-approval requirements of SEBI's related-party transaction rules. Ola Electric said the payments reflected a full migration of its cloud and AI infrastructure to Krutrim and that the transactions were arm's-length and fully compliant.

On September 15, 2026, a three-judge bench of Kenya's High Court (Justices Francis Gikonyo, Roselyn Aburili and Teresia Wanjiku) declared null and void the Kenyan government's sale of a 15% Safaricom stake to Vodacom for KES 204.3 billion (plus KES 40.2 billion paid in advance against future dividends), part of the June 30, 2026 transaction that raised Vodacom's Safaricom ownership from roughly 35% to 55%. The court found the transaction violated the Constitution through inadequate public participation, concealment of material information from the public and Parliament, an arbitrary pricing process, failure to address national-security concerns, and mischaracterizing what was effectively a takeover as a partial divestiture. Kenya's Court of Appeal fast-tracked the government/Vodacom's substantive appeal on October 13, 2026 rather than ruling separately on a stay request; as of the sweep date, Vodafone Kenya remains the registered shareholder and the purchase money remains held pending the appeal, so the July 31, 2026 governance changes handing Vodacom expanded board and CEO-nomination control remain in place but legally unresolved.

At Xero's 2026 Annual Meeting on August 27, 2026, shareholders voted 70.54% against adopting the company's remuneration report, an unprecedented rebuke driven by proxy advisers' objections to a 22% increase in CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy's target pay package to US$18.5 million (NZ$25.5 million), composed largely of long-term equity awards. The vote came as Xero's share price had fallen roughly 49-50% over the prior year, from a 2025 peak of ~NZ$194 to NZ$82.74, and after Singh Cassidy sold several million dollars of vested shares in July 2026. The non-binding vote does not overturn the pay package but signals major institutional-investor dissatisfaction with executive compensation governance.

The National Bank of Belgium (NBB) publicly announced on August 25, 2026 that Wise Europe SA had failed to comply, by a March 31, 2026 deadline, with a formal order the NBB issued on July 8, 2025 requiring remediation of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing deficiencies. The original order cited failures including inadequate information-sharing between group entities for AML/CFT purposes (Article 13 Section 1), deficiencies in customer identification and beneficial-owner verification (Articles 23, 26, 27), inadequate due diligence on customer relationships and occasional transactions (Article 35 Section 1), and failure to properly analyze atypical transactions (Article 45) under Belgium's Anti-Money Laundering Act. The publication, made under Article 93 Section 2(1) of that Act, was the first such public identification under Belgium's strengthened AML enforcement-disclosure policy. It is a separate NBB supervisory action from the Belgian federal prosecutors' criminal investigation into ~EUR500M in suspicious Wise Europe transactions reported in June 2026. Wise said it has implemented the required changes.

On August 24, 2026, Taiwan prosecutors indicted 9 people, including two Nvidia Taiwan employees, over an alleged scheme to illegally export 130 AI servers equipped with export-controlled Nvidia B300 GPUs to China in violation of US export controls. A Nvidia distribution manager surnamed Chang was named the 'key figure' who authorized release of the B300 GPUs; a second Nvidia employee was charged with breach of trust. Prosecutors say defendants used fake websites, falsified end-user certifications, and forged business records to route 74 servers to China (50 via Indonesia, 16 directly, 8 via Japan/Hong Kong); 56 servers were intercepted by Taiwan customs. Nvidia said it would work with Taiwanese authorities to resolve the allegations. US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jim Banks cited the case in a letter arguing Nvidia's inability to detect this Southeast Asia diversion scheme undermines its claims that it can police direct China shipments.

In mid-August 2026, Revolut circulated a proposal to shareholders to increase co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky's personal borrowing limit against his roughly 29% stake (worth an estimated $33 billion at the company's $115 billion valuation) from $50 million to $250 million. The proposal, internally codenamed 'Project Shasta,' would also remove the existing requirement for board approval of larger share pledges, eliminate proportional limits on how much stock can be pledged as collateral, and expand the share classes eligible to be pledged. Storonsky is the only person at Revolut to whom the pledge provisions apply. Revolut said it 'routinely updates its articles' to reflect the company's growth; governance commentators noted the removal of board approval and proportional limits was the more significant change, particularly given Storonsky simultaneously serves as CEO.

Stellantis informed union Unifor in August 2026 that it was seriously considering closing and selling its Brampton, Ontario assembly plant, idled since February 2025 amid Trump-era tariffs, putting roughly 3,000 autoworkers' jobs at risk. The company subsequently signed a memorandum of understanding to sell the plant to Roshel, a defense contractor, which Unifor says breaches both the company's 2023 collective-agreement commitment to keep Brampton staffed and a confidential federal government funding contract (worth up to C$529 million) that bars plant closure before 2035 absent circumstances beyond Stellantis's reasonable control. Unifor national president Lana Payne said the 2023 commitment 'is now broken.' Stellantis also conditioned finalizing pattern agreements for workers at its Windsor, Etobicoke, Mississauga, and Red Deer facilities on acceptance of the Brampton closure, which Unifor called 'unacceptable.' About 9,000 Unifor members, including roughly 2,200 already on indefinite layoff, voted on strike action October 17-18, 2026.

Ola Electric reversed a Rs 57 crore (~$6.8M) provision it had booked for potential penalties under India's battery-cell Production-Linked Incentive scheme in its June-quarter (Q1 FY27) results, before receiving formal approval from the Ministry of Heavy Industries for the extension and waiver it had requested. Statutory auditor BSR & Co. LLP (a KPMG India affiliate) issued a qualified audit opinion - the company's first since its 2024 listing - stating it could not obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence in the absence of MHI approval. Ola Electric shares fell 5-6% on the news despite a narrower quarterly loss.

Following Vodacom's June 30, 2026 completion of a deal buying a controlling 55% stake in Safaricom (KES 204bn/EUR1.36bn for 15% from the Kenyan government plus KES 68bn/EUR450m for 5% from Vodafone), Safaricom sought and won shareholder approval on July 31, 2026 to remove long-standing governance protections tied to Kenyan-government ownership. The changes give Vodafone/Vodacom the right to nominate the CEO and all executive and shareholder-appointed directors (previously requiring board/government input), remove the requirement for government approval before regional expansion including into Ethiopia, eliminate the requirement that the executive committee be 'predominantly Kenyan', replace prior 10%/40% ownership-threshold protections with a single 50% threshold, and drop the mandatory dividend policy. Vodacom subsequently appointed two South African executives to Safaricom's board, increasing its board representation to 5 seats while Kenyan-government ownership fell from 35% to 20%.

A stockholder derivative lawsuit filed July 31, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Berliner v. Huang et al.) accused Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, CFO Colette Kress, and the board of breaching fiduciary duty by knowingly training NeMo Megatron and other language models on pirated 'shadow library' datasets (Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, Books3/SlimPajama), including material Nvidia allegedly sourced directly from Anna's Archive in 2023 despite an internal warning about copyright issues. The complaint also alleges Nvidia's Magpie TTS, FUGATTO, PersonaPlex and other voice-synthesis models extracted biometric voiceprints from hundreds of thousands of hours of speech recordings without notice or consent, in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, and that proxy filings misrepresented data-sourcing compliance.

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency denied Wise National Trust's application to establish a national trust bank in Austin, Texas, citing 'significant supervisory and compliance concerns.' The OCC found the proposed organizers demonstrated a 'persistent inability to sufficiently manage' money-laundering and illicit-finance risk, lacked sufficient familiarity with federal banking law, and had no historical experience with fiduciary activities. The denial followed a July 2025 multistate consent order in which Wise US paid $4.2 million over deficiencies in suspicious-activity investigation and reporting, transaction-monitoring data integrity, and untimely correction of prior AML/BSA deficiencies. Wise said it has since strengthened its US compliance program and plans to reapply.

The Delhi High Court, acting on an RBI petition, ordered the winding up of Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL) through orders dated July 8 and July 22, 2026, appointing Girikumar M. Nair, a former SBI Chief General Manager, as liquidator with full board powers under the Banking Regulation Act. RBI said PPBL had sufficient liquidity to repay all deposit liabilities. The order formally closes out the bank whose license RBI had already cancelled, citing a persistent pattern of non-compliance detrimental to depositors' and the public interest.

Australian Federal Police's human exploitation taskforce opened an investigation into WiseTech Global co-founder Richard White, reported June 19, 2026, following a complaint from a former executive at a company he controls. The allegations, which White has emphatically denied, include coercing a financially and immigration-vulnerable woman into a relationship and providing false information on a visa application; no charges have been filed. Separately, a WiseTech board review found White had misled the board about the nature of several personal relationships. White stepped down as executive chair effective July 7, 2026 while remaining on the board as an executive director and chief innovation officer; independent director Raelene Murphy became chair. WiseTech shares had fallen more than two-thirds since early 2025 amid the reporting, then rose 8.1% on the resignation announcement. A prior 2024-2025 board review had cleared White of separate allegations of misappropriating company funds and improper relationships with staff.