In a board meeting, the military general asked the airline’s CEO, “Why is the pilot’s food being labeled?” “Because that’s the way we always do it,” the CEO responded. “Well then stop doing it,” the military director said. “If I’m …
Recent Posts
- The Corporate Governance Game Changer That Needs to Come To Canada
- A rebuttal to Terence Corcoran’s “OSFI and the bureaucratization of corporate governance”
- Richard Leblanc: Ten reasons that pay governance is broken
- Richard Leblanc: Ten Corporate Governance Trends for 2014
- Gender diversity on boards: My discussion notes
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Risk Governance and Combined Assurance
Regulators turning up anti-bribery heat on corporate boards: But will practices change?
Russia is one of the most corrupt nations in the world (see a recent anti-corruption story on Russia by the New York Times). It ranks 143rd of all 182 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, with a score of …
Banking Directors Need to be at the Top of Their Game
There’s an old maxim that corporations don’t fail, boards do. And when banks fail, the reason is poor management, which is the fault of a poor board. Take the case of Lehman Brothers, the financial services firm that collapsed in …
E. Coli, Contaminated Beef and Shoddy Governance
I interviewed an independent director of Canadian food retailer Loblaws about risk and he told me the most important risk for Loblaws that could cause a ‘run on the bank’ (his words) was food safety. Food safety was front and …
The Enbridge Oil Spill and Role of the Board
In a scathing report by the National Transportation Safety Board (“NTSB”), Canadian company Enbridge Inc. was rebuked for its pipeline rupture on July 25, 2010, and subsequent environmental damage. The pipeline ruptured due to corrosion fatigue cracks that grew and …
Bribery, Cyber-Security and Derivatives: Is Internal Audit up to the Task?
Do internal auditors have the resources, skills and authority necessary to do their job? I wonder. I was asked recently to be an expert witness in an alleged bribery case. Internal audit is one of the first places I look …
Derivatives May be Ungovernable
The recent loss of 2Billion dollars by JPMorgan confirms what is now a blindingly obvious governance reality. Board of directors do not understand derivatives and cannot control management’s use of them. The same may be said for regulators. One job …
SNC Lavalin and RBC in the News
If the CEO of SNC Lavalin allegedly over-rode his own CFO and breached the company’s code of ethics in authorizing $56 million of questionable payments to undisclosed agents that the federal Canadian police are now investigating, did the board of …
Does Canada have a White Collar Crime Problem? A Red Flag Checklist for Directors
“This city, this province, this country has a reputation of being the best location to carry out white collar crime, corporate fraud, in the industrialized world.” These public words are not from some scholarly journal but from a hard-hitting, no-nonsense …
UBS’s $2B fraud: Teachable moments for risk management, corporate governance & banking regulation
After the 2008 financial crisis, I wrote to Professor John Hull, a derivatives expert at University of Toronto’s Rotman School, and asked whether the boards of investment banks should have directors with derivatives expertise on them. His response was “There …