At the very last minute the Insolvency Service, acting for the UK Government, has just abandoned disqualification proceedings against five former non-executive directors of Carillion, which collapsed in 2018. This is a massive relief, not just to those individuals, but to the whole non-exec community as it would have put full responsibility on all non-execs and audit committees to detect and stop hidden executive misconduct. Three ex-Carillion...
A company with just £24m annual revenue goes bankrupt with £1.9 bn of debts and a further £0.6m financing commitments. It made two appallingly large and risky investments that, not surprisingly, went disastrously wrong. It should have made national headlines amid demands for prosecutions and disbarments, as well as calls to tighten company law and the Corporate Governance Code. Except that it isn’t a company. It’s a local authority, Woking...
Making better decisions is the holy grail of the boardroom. Corporate governance is full of rules and procedures, but very little on actual decision-making. There is however considerable academic discussion of good decision-making. A really interesting example of this was published by Stanford Graduate School of Business in their ‘All Else Equal’ series: ‘The Path to Good Decisions Starts with Data’. Their basic tenet is pretty unarguable: Good...
Corporate Governance
Economics
Notes From A NED