UK: Anthony Bolton on corporate governance

One of the UK's most well known fund managers, Anthony Bolton, has written a short piece in the UK's Financial Times newspaper titled "What investors must look for in captains of industry". Amongst the points made by Bolton are the following concerning corporate governance and the Combined Code:

One of the other things we will consider when we look at a company’s management is the corporate governance structure – are there sufficient checks and balances there to control executives? Here we have a pragmatic rather than a box-ticking culture. If something is working, we will not change it even if it is not necessarily best practice. However, we do in general like separate chairman and chief executives. Where they are the same person, this can be driven by personal ego and does not necessarily reflect business acumen. Also, when matters are not going as well as they should be, it can be harder to effect management or strategic change. I don’t personally agree with all the aspects of the City code of best practice [i.e., the Combined Code]. In particular, the belief that a non-executive’s independence becomes tainted by tenure is not one that I support. In my experience, directors are either independent by nature or not. But one of the consequences of this rule is that the average tenure of non-executives has fallen. In some cases, this means there is no-one on the board who has experienced a full business cycle for that particular industry"

For further information see:

Financial Times article | Times interview | Guardian interview |