What are the kinds of companies you see as being more willing to implement corporate governance?
In Britain, we see companies of different sizes listed on the London Stock Exchange. Inevitably, it was the smaller companies that took to corporate governance. And these are not family owned enterprises; they are all publicly quoted companies. The point was that at the time we produced our guidelines, if I remember correctly, the capital value of the largest company on the London Stock Exchange was fifteen-and-a-half billion pounds, the smallest was 375,000 pounds. Now, that’s the enormous difference in the sizes of the companies. So you cannot expect the smaller companies to implement in full the kind of code where we suggested that there should be independent directors, board of committees etc., because some of the smaller companies have smaller boards. But that doesn’t matter. The essential point of our code was that companies have to disclose in their annual report and accounts, how far they have complied with the code and explain areas of non-compliance. Now, if the areas of non-
