Template:Dividends generally
What is a “dividend”?
ISDA’s crack drafting squad™, usually so unquenchable in their yen to define the living daylights out of any concept, however quotidian, is strangely mute on the question of what exactly a dividend is. A dividend is just — you know, a dividend.
The ’squad also threw in the concept of an “Extraordinary Dividend”, but — rest a while before heading in that direction — that definition, truthfully, will leave you none the wiser.
What of cash distributions to Shareholders that aren’t described as, or generally in the nature of, dividends? Is there such a thing? By the lights of the 2002 ISDA Equity Derivatives Definitions you would be inclined to conclude there is not. In any case, you are in your Calculation Agent’s hands.
What about some court-ordered compensation payment a Share issuer is obliged to pay to a class of its shareholders as a result of some ignominy perpetrated on the company’s behalf at some point in the past (a panicked, and ultimately negligent misstatement about its the real extent of its exposure to Russia/Argentina/The Millennium Bug/The Sub-Prime Market/LIBOR/Archegos/Russia (again)[1] which induced panicky investors not to sell, and which turned out to be a mistake for which those investors were entitled to compensation? This one we feel more confident about: this is not a dividend, for reasons which we go into in greater detail when discussing the parallel concept of Income under the 2010 GMSLA.
- ↑ Delete as applicable.