Sustainability initiatives may be all the rage, but an increasing number of scandals among high-profile startups and highly-valued corporate behemoths is underscoring the role governance plays in corporate health and due diligence.
As WeWork prepares to go public next month via a SPAC with BowX Acquisition Corporation, "it's important to note that the first IPO failed miserably," writes Trepp's Jyoti Yadav in a new analysis, including "skewed voting power and strong centralized control" that gave founder Adam Neumann shares each worth 20 votes.
And "the significant valuation cut that WeWork incurred (from $47 billion in the 2019 IPO to $9 billion now) underlines the fact that governance issues, while not discussed as often as environmental or social issues in ESG space, can have a significant economic impact," Yadav says.
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