[Opinion]
I have been invited to provide my view on current issues on European Corporate Governance (CG). I am happy to follow the approach of David Alexander providing his opinion on the question “Is there such a thing as European Financial Reporting?” published in this Journal in the 4th issue of 2012: He proposes to concentrate on the “opinion” rather the “expert” part and does not provide an extensive bibliography. He concludes that financial reporting in Europe – which is not European financial reporting – is in a mess and highlights the (not always convincing) role of us academics in this standard-setting game. At least for the European Union (not Europe, as e.g. Switzerland or Norway should not be ignored) my conclusion seems to be obvious: of course there is nothing like a “European Corporate Governance”. We now have 28 Member States with 28 national company and commercial laws, national and international sets of disclosure rules, codes etc. However, in the last decade we have witnessed the European Commission as a very active standard setter. 2000 words for this article are by far not enough even to briefly describe this. Accordinly, I will concentrate on two recent attempts to change, improve and harmonize corporate governance: The Green Paper “The European corporate governance framework” from April 2011 and the Commission’s “Action Plan: European company law and corporate governance – a modern legal framework for more engaged shareholders and sustainable companies” from December 2012. In the rest of this article, I will use the terms Green Paper and Action Plan. […]
