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SFO uses civil recovery under Proceeds of Crime Act in corruption case
There have been reports over the weekend of Macmillan publishers agreeing an £11m settlement with the Serious Fraud Office in relation to corrupt practices in Africa to win contracts and the SFO has...
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How does the board ensure its policies are carried out?
I started an online discussion on this topic on a forum for governance professionals and was startled by the responses. They read as if they resulted from quoting a particularly unimaginative textbook,...
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FTSE 100 CEO pay unrelated to performance
I have written before, quoting Chris Bones and Sir Paul Judge, about how directors have, over a number of years, captured increasingly huge pay packages that bear no relation to their own or their...
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Peter Day's radio 4 programme on corporate governance
If you missed it then it is worth listening to this programme on corporate governance. It covers too many issues too superficially and seeks too many easy soundbites but it assembled a group of mostly...
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Transparency International calls on FIFA to improve governance
Article by Aarti Maharaj in Corporate Secretary reports that Transparency International, the corruption campaigning and monitoring group, has produced a report that suggests, among other things, that a...
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Do directors of private companies have a duty to declare insider knowledge...
Yesterday The Times reported on the settlement of a court case involving former shareholders in Uswitch who alleged that the Marquess of Milford Haven induced them to sell their shares, at an...
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Financial Times Briefings: Corporate Governance
My book on UK corporate governance is finally published.ISBN-10: 0273745972 "Corporate governance describes the systems, procedures and behaviours by which an organisation is directed and...
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Psychopaths in the boardroom
A recent Horizon television programme for the BBC discussed the physical differences of psychopaths, whether noticeably different brain functions or differences in key genes. One of the principal...
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Update for "women in the boardroom"
Politicians love easy wins: they love good news; so UK government ministers are positively ecstatic that their calls for greater representation of women in corporate boardrooms has borne fruit after...
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The Boardroom Conversation
Unless key figures in an organisation live company values and are prepared to speak up, corporate governance policies are pretty much meaningless.....see my piece on the Boardroom Conversation in...
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Governance on Olympus
Sorry for the dreadful pun of a title. Its poor quality gives some indication of the struggle I have had, and continue to have, with this important case study in appalling governance. The big question...
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Olympus: you really couldn't make it up
Readers may feel I go on too much about the scandal at Japanese camera and medical equipment firm Olympus but, although everything about it seems so extreme that it has become a parody of a corporate...
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Corporate social responsibility or corporate performance?
In the Sunday Times today (unfortunately hidden behind a paywall) Dominic Lawson points out that Fred Goodwin, former head of RBS, was chairman of the Princes Trust and his company had extensive...
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Communication, social media and crisis management
In the new world we live in, companies need a policy on social media. I can imagine the reader of that sentence looking aghast, thinking about the extra burdens already faced as a result of new...
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Board diversity and female executives
It is a rather unattractive characteristic of a blogger to say 'I told you so'. You come over as a smug know-all. But I can't resist it. All of a suddent there is a flux of reports (see recent study...
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EU Audit Reforms
I may seem a little late responding to the EU Commission's proposed reform of auditing for public companies that was announced on November 2011. However, it often seems best to let the dust settle...
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PR Disaster at Goldman Sachs
Today a senior executive at Goldman Sachs has resigned and published a damning article in the New York Times explaining his reason; which is that he can no longer stand the culture of screwing the...
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Maybe customers don't care about ethics at Goldman Sachs
I wonder whether my strictures against Goldman Sachs ethical standards are mere self-righteousness on my part. The thought arises from the evidence: a tidal wave of criticism and bad publicity after...
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Financial Reporting Council paper on "Comply or Explain"
In February 2012 the UK's Financial Reporting Council published a report on the "Comply or Explain" approach applied to its Corporate Governance Code. Compliance with the Code is a statutory...
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Damning Business Ethics Report from the USA
I am grateful to Norman Marks in his blog for bringing this latest annual report from the Ethics Resource Center to my attention. The team surveyed nearly 5,000 people across the USA.Consider some...
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