Singapore-listed companies can do better in evaluating their boards, having greater board diversity and providing reliable financial reports and disclosures.
These will help to shore up trust among investors and shareholders, said Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) managing director Ravi Menon on Monday.
His call comes even as companies here have improved in their corporate governance performance, with big companies scoring an average of 69.5 per cent in 2023, according to a report by the National University of Singapore's Centre for Governance and Sustainability. This is an improvement over the 65.7 per cent in 2022.
Big companies are those with market capitalisation of $1 billion and above as at Dec 31, 2022.
Mr Menon was speaking at the launch of Corporate Governance Week 2023 by the Securities Investors Association (Singapore), or Sias, at Parkroyal Marina Bay.
Despite the overall improvement in scores, Mr Menon said that companies' board of directors, auditors and shareholders all have a part to play in doing better to build trust, which is the bedrock of the financial sector.
Company boards are already required to do a formal annual assessment of the effectiveness of board committees and directors, and also have to disclose how they conduct this assessment.
"But introspection on performance has been an area of missed opportunity for most listed companies here," Mr Menon said.
He referred to a 2022 KPMG survey which found that around half of listed companies are still providing boilerplate disclosures and are unwilling to disclose any objective performance criteria.
This story is from the November 07, 2023 edition of The Straits Times.
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This story is from the November 07, 2023 edition of The Straits Times.
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