The departure of Rio’s CEO and other executives is a pyrrhic victory for institutional shareholders. They’ve got heads on pikes but the Juukan Gorge is gone.
- Lecturer in Social Procurement, The University of Melbourne
ASIC is passing up opportunities to prosecute, all the more so in this ‘very different economic environment’.
Wages are going backwards, loans are in arrears, companies are being kept alive by government support and an exemption from insolvency rules, yet still they are paying out dividends.
If its foreign owners thought it had a future they would have kicked in money.
Directors’ obsession with maximising shareholder value has sucked the liquidity out of companies, making them brittle in the face of crises.
Don’t expect institutional investors to become activists for change to make corporations more responsible. More direct approaches are urgently needed.
Putting employee directors on Australian boards is seriously back on the agenda for the first time since the 1970s.
The ASX was late to the corporate governance party and its fourth reheat remains as flawed as ever.
While many Hayne’s recommendations are laudable and abolutely necessary, they are not sufficent to end of the regular cycle of appalling misconduct and inquiries.
With public hearings finished, insiders are making a last-ditch bid to either soften or sidetrack the final report of the banking royal commission.
In his three volume 1,000 page interim report Commissioner Hayne has built an irrefutable case for root and branch reform.
Parallels in the historical trajectory of AMP and IOOF are striking. Both were founded in the 1840s. Both demutualised, and now both find themselves centre stage at the banking royal commission.
Evidence to the Banking Royal Commission points to the systemic failings of corporate governance built on the idea of shareholder primacy. It’s time to rethink the unitary board system for a start.
Splitting company boards and allowing employees to elect board members are just the start of the reforms needed to fix corporate governance.
The way corporations are structured makes it hard to establish criminal culpability even if directors and executives control processes and are paid bonuses based on performance.
Contact Warren for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
- X (formerly Twitter): @warrenstaples
- Article Feed
- ORCID
- Joined
