UK: ICGN conference - a couple of speeches

At last week's ICGN corporate governance conference, speeches were delivered by, amongst others, Lord Myners, the Financial Services Secretary at HM Treasury, and Sir Christopher Hogg, chairman of the Financial Reporting Council: see, respectively, here (html) and here (pdf).

Lord Myners used his speech to repeat the point that he has long made - "Shareholders have duties as owners; and they should fulfill them" - and questioned the reluctance expressed by some for further changes in the governance framework.

Sir Christopher Hogg's speech concerned the FRC's work on the proposed Stewardship Code for Institutional Investors. He recognised that it was appropriate for the FRC to undertake this work but warned that it represented a considerable challenge in terms of difficulty and reputational risk. Sir Christopher also observed:

In the years since the Cadbury Committee Code was published in 1992 a great deal has been achieved in corporate governance. However, the monitoring of corporates by their shareholders is being profoundly affected by some major trends in the investment industry ... The FRC is acutely aware of the impact of these trends, which has been indicated by many consultations in recent years and brought to a head by the financial crisis ... There is scope and time for the FRC to remedy this. But success in doing so cannot be taken for granted, will take years, not months, and will require changed attitudes, practices and policies on both sides of the engagement process".