The Sorkin RoadMap for Fairness

From today's PE Week Wire:

Andrew Ross Sorkin of NY Times Dealbook has developed some middle ground between Ben Stein’s call for banning management buyouts and the private equity market’s calls for continued regulatory indifference. Specifically, he has a four-part plan for fixing certain problems inherent in management buyouts. It goes something like this:
Require that a majority of minority shareholders approve the transaction. If senior management holds a control position, don’t let its vote be the only one that matters.
Use independent advisors. Real ones without either existing company relationships or a financial stake in the deal (i.e., stapled financing agreements).
Set aside up to 10% of the newly-private company for public shareholders. In other words, pre-empt the whining.
Provide some detail of the business plan for the company, once it becomes private. Let shareholders decide if management can best add value as a public or private entity.
Points one and two seem like no-brainers. Both help prevent self-dealing without much downside. If it’s really a good deal, then the minority shareholders will vote for it. Sure certain Wall Street firms will lose some fees, but not in the aggregate. It might even promote the creation of new boutique I-banks.
Points three and four are a bit trickier (as Sorkin admits).
My concern on point three isn’t so much the mechanics of it, difficult though they may be to design. Instead, it’s an issue of consistency. Assuming the point one becomes a generally-accepted principle, would a majority of this new 10% class have the right to veto a subsequent sale? If not, why not? Maybe the answer is that public and private shareholders are granted different levels of privilege, but then the same could be argued of controlling and non-controlling shareholders. It seems that you must either accept point one and deny three, or accept them both with a giant addendum to number three.
I have been arguing for a while that there is an inherent unfairness that public shareholders vote on acquisitions without knowing what the future possibilities are. I also think that the only viable solution is to demand more of the banks charged with writing fairness opinions (I’d also ask more of corporate boards, but it’s futile to request objectivity of cronies). If a company gives away its future gameplan – particularly when adoption of said plan is not yet approved – it almost certainly puts the company at a competitive disadvantage. Again, put some bite in the currently-toothless fairness opinions.
Finally, let’s add a fifth point (as first suggested by DealBook reader Andy Johnston): Make public all auctions of public companies. Once a corporate board is actively willing to consider buyout bids, retain a banker and issue what would amount to a buyout RFP (request for proposal). Give everyone one month to submit bids – which is a tight enough timeframe to still reward those private equity firms that helped initiate the deal.To be clear, I mean something even more transparent than afterthought “go shop” provisions.
Some M&A bankers may object to this proposal, saying that their selective bluebook mailing lists are designed to discourage frivolous bids. I say that I’d rather suffer through a handful of frivolous bids, rather than arbitrarily restrict the process in a may that may depress/prevent legitimate bids.
It also is worth noting, of course, that all of the above likely would require federal regulatory action. So be it. Even free markets require some ground rules.