ABSTRACT
Unfortunately the Siemens example is not an isolated example of poor corporate governance. Over the last decade there have been a number of corporate scandals, and while there are several US examples, such as Enron and WorldCom, governance scandals occur globally. In January 2009 the founder and chairman of Satyam, a leading Indian software firm which had been listed on the Bombay and New York stock exchanges, admitted to a fraud of $1.47 billion. This is despite the fact that the Asian Corporate Governance Association had rated India third out of 11 Asian countries in terms of the quality of corporate governance (The Economist, 2009). In Germany, Deutsche Bank was accused of spying on employees and board members, while in Switzerland UBS was accused of allowing some US customers to use their accounts for purposes of tax evasion. As these examples illustrate, investors must be concerned over how well firms are being managed, what oversight there is of management and their decisions, and whether they are delivering value to shareholders.
