The 20th European Corporate Governance Conference – Special Interview with Edwin Ward, Director at the Institute of Directors Malta.
Standard Publications is the Media Partner for the 20th European Corporate Governance Conference being held in Malta at Le Méridien on 4 May. The event is sponsored by EY EAME, EY Malta and Paragon Europe and co-organised by the Institute of Directors Malta (IoD) in conjunction with the Malta Institute of Management (MIM) and the European Confederation of Directors' Associations (ecoDa) together with BusinessEurope and EuropeanIssuers. This interview is about corporate governance and the upcoming conference.
What is the IoD and why is it relevant in Malta?
The Institute of Directors (IoD) is a business organisation for company directors, senior business leaders and entrepreneurs. It will celebrate its 60th anniversary in Malta this year under the leadership of James J. Satariano who has been its chairman for two decades. Under Mr Satariano the IoD has become the foremost business organisation in Malta working on corporate governance education, events, workshops, training and has become the trusted partner of all key institutions on Corporate Governance issues – Ministry of Finance, MFSA, MSE, Central Bank, FinanceMalta, Chamber of Advocates, Malta Institute of Accountants, and many others. The IoD's mission is free enterprise, entrepreneurialism, wealth creation and good corporate governance, and represents the views of businesses and IoD members in the media and with government. Members of the IoD come from companies of all sizes and from all industries in Malta. IoD gives them a voice on director issues and supported Malta's EU membership bid by hosting several key conferences as well as by becoming directly involved with ecoDa in more recent times. ecoDa represents around 55,000 board directors from across the EU. ecoDa's member organisations represent board directors from the largest public companies to the smallest private firms, both listed and unlisted, with a mission to promote the role of directors, to develop professionalism and European governance standards. With the current political governance issues in Malta, and financial services having become a cornerstone of our economy with their contribution to Malta's GDP now over 20 per cent, the Islands' financial services are in the spotlight like never before. A commitment to outstanding private sector corporate governance might help Malta to retain its place in the financial services world even with difficulties in other areas.
What is Corporate Governance and how did you come to be the co-organisers of the 20th European Corporate Governance Conference?
Corporate governance is doing business the right way to be a better business and to focus on long-term value creation.
Improving Corporate Governance education among CEOs, chairmen and directors, as well as senior management, gives companies a competitive advantage in seeking investment and helps the company to work more effectively. I believe in the concept put forward by Professor Bob Garratt who is now Chairman of the University of Stellenbosh Centre for Corporate Governance for Africa. Bob created the concept of the "learning Board", and Bob's teachings were my departure point in the world of Corporate Governance. I also learned a great deal from Peter Barrett, who was a board member of leading Hong Kong companies Hutchison Whampoa and Hong Kong Telephone for 15 years. He is a founding council member and honorary council life member of Hong Kong IoD, and has helped us and mentored us in Malta for more than a decade. Corporate Governance is a dynamic phenomenon, in two important ways: First, the interaction among the parties is dynamic – the board, management, shareholders and stakeholders. Second, the rights and responsibilities of each of the parties have a time component: Policy creation, Strategy, Management Supervision and Reporting all take place during different periods of the year and many of them are set by regulators and stock exchanges.
Given our track-record as IoD Malta in introducing Corporate Governance to the Maltese Islands and being its champion since Mr Satariano took the Chairman's office in 1998, we were the natural partners for ecoDa to put together the 20th European Corporate Governance Conference as part of the official Maltese EU Presidency programme. In fact, I presented Malta to the delegates at the 19th European Corporate Governance Conference in Bratislava last October and was given a very encouraging response. It was a fantastic conference, incredible for networking and building very important business contacts, as well as being a very enriching education due to because of so many knowledgeable speakers.
What will the 20th European Corporate Governance Conference focus on?
We have created five pillars for this conference with our 30 speakers. After long consultation periods with both ecoDa and EY, we are very fortunate to have had the support of ecoDa Secretary General Béatrice Richez-Baum and Elizabeth Krahulecz at EY who heads Regulatory and Public Policy for EY EMEIA, both of whom have been deeply involved in putting this conference together. The 20th European Corporate Governance Conference will be a full day event on Thursday May 4 at Le Meridien in Balluta Bay. The conference format is a series of five panels that explore long-term value creation; rebuilding trust with corporate governance; corporate governance and CSR; digitalization and innovation. A final panel – "The 20th European Corporate Governance Conference: A milestone for Corporate Governance history" – will feature contributions from Patrick Zurstrassen, Honorary Chair of ecoDa, Founding Member and Former Chairman of ILA, the Luxembourg Institute of Directors, David Devlin, Chairman, European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and Stephen Martin, Director General, IoD UK.
You are Conference Host and will be moderating the first panel on value creation, what kind of things will you be covering?
Well my panel is full of the best minds in corporate governance today with the exception of my old friend Dr Roger Barker who could not attend this year's conference. We have panellists from all over the world, including an incredible lady from Japan, Kiyomi Saito, the President of JBond Totan Securities, which has almost 90% market share of the eTrading securities platform in Japan and was Executive Director at Morgan Stanley Investment Bank, Toshiba Corporation and Kajima Corporation. We have often talked about corporate governance not being the same thing in Europe and Japan, where the system is more about a stakeholder model rather than the shareholder model in the States and some European countries which maintains that ownership is key and therefore the shareholder is the primary focus of governance. We also have Mark Goydor in the panel from Tomorrow's Company, and during our last meeting in London earlier this year Mark had just finished some seminal work on Stewardship. Mark has served in advisory capacities for British Airways, BT, Co-operative Financial Services and Novo Nordisk, and currently with Alliance Boots, and Camelot. A broadcaster, writer and winner of the Institute of Management Studies Tillers Millennium Trophy for best speaker, Mark was Director Magazine Director of the Month and in recent years he has concentrated on the issue of board and investor responsibilities for stewardship, co-authoring a report with the Institute for Family Business on Family Business Stewardship. Apart from discussing value creation and corporate governance, the panel will look at issues around long-term value creation stars, the Shareholder's Rights Directive role in helping European value creation; the relationship between the Capital Markets Union and value creation, and how it will create value for the European economy. Other excellent speakers in that first panel include Florence Bindelle, Secretary General, EuropeanIssuers, Marcello Bianchi, Member of the Bureau of the OECD Corporate Governance Committee and Deputy Director General, Assonime and Peter Swabey, Policy & Research Director, ICSA Governance Institute. Each of them is an expert in corporate governance, so it will be a very strong opening to the conference.
What else is notable about the 20th European Corporate Governance Conference?
Everything! This is by far the most significant business conference held in Malta on this subject.
The conference is supported by the Ministry of Finance and will be opened by Finance Minister Edward Scicluna featuring the single most talented corpus of corporate governance experts ever to visit Malta. We have two very inspiring speakers in Panel 3 that I would like to highlight in particular. Dr Elona Prroj, Director of No Blood Feud, Yes to Life Foundation and Madi Sharma, European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) Employers Group. With their interventions we believe that CSR and corporate governance will widen its scope to include human rights and social justice, which will be a very significant moment in the conference. Dr Prroj is the lead pastor of Word of Christ Church in Albania. After the terrible murder of her husband because of a vendetta, she forgave the killer and founded "No Blood Feud – Yes to Life" Foundation, a foundation that is very active in the fight against blood feud and active to provide holistic care for the families that suffer from this phenomenon in the north of Albania. She is also a board member in the leadership of World Vision Albania and Kosovo. Formerly she was the vice general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance of Albania. She is a remarkable woman and a true inspiration, nobody can fail to be moved by Dr. Prroj and she has tremendous stage presence. Just like Madi Sharma, who has visited Malta many times, I have seen and heard Madi speak several times and she is a very articulate communicator. She is a public speaker internationally, particularly in the field of entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurship, diversity; gender balance and her passion for CSR. Her presentations, spoken from the heart, motivate and inspire, and seek to make others consider their ability to affect change.
What do you expect the outcome of the conference to be?
Good corporate governance should help companies function more effectively in the long term for the benefit of all stakeholders, managing risks, pursuing opportunities, and improving triple bottom line performance; planet, people and profit. The goal is to improve future performance. We want to get this message out to Malta's companies through this conference and grow the level of engagement in pursuing corporate governance education. If we see more local people registering for the conference that will be a sure sign that some of the ideas discussed with you today about improving business conduct have gotten through. For local delegates, talking with their peers and networking with other business people from all around the world will open up new opportunities for them. I sincerely hope that we will see a full complement from the local business scene next Thursday. It will also be a place where the local business community can do business with over 200 other delegates seeking collaboration, services or business development.
Twenty years ago, when Mr Satariano started to outline why this area of business practice was important, there was little data, research or statistics providing proof that corporate governance was an effective business tool. Today, a growing number of research studies document the relationship between corporate governance and triple bottom-line performance.
We are out of time so I will only mention two. One that finds a positive relationship between CSR and access to capital, 'CSR and Access to Finance' which comes from the Harvard Business School, and a second study describing how corporate responsibility reporting enhances financial value, which came from EY. As I said at the beginning, we can work on the reputation of the Maltese financial centre and market its products and services by using private sector led initiatives on corporate governance education and standards to substitute for failing confidence in other areas.
For the programme and to register visit: http://ift.tt/2oZEddd or call 9920 7677. A limited number of conference-only places are left at the special offer price of €199+VAT on a first-come first-served basis. IoD and MIM members benefit from a special members-only rate, conference-only €99+VAT.
from The Malta Independent http://ift.tt/2oOkRvo
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