A three-day workshop in Cairo on “Reporting on Corporate Governance” aimed to give participants a better understanding of how and for whom companies should be run and controlled. The reporters received guidance on what to look out for and extra questions to ask as they probe into dark corporate corners and help make the way in which companies are run more transparent.
The workshop in the Egyptian capital in April was the second of a planned series in partnership with the Global Corporate Governance Forum after a pilot session in Belgrade, Serbia, last October. It debated a range of topics such as the separation of company ownership and control, the role and composition of boards of directors, separating the roles of chair and chief executive, shareholders’ rights, independent auditing, conflicts of interest, transparency and full disclosure of information.
Twelve journalists from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories took part in an intensive mixture of news conferences given by various ‘stakeholders’ interested incorporate governance and writing stories based on the conferences. The Forum, linked to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), uses the slogan that “better companies make better societies”. Workshop participants were quick to comment that better governance and fuller disclosure of information might have made banks’ problems in the current ‘credit crunch’ more visible sooner and perhaps easier to handle.
Speakers included Jalil Tarif, Chief Executive Officer of the Amman Stock Exchange, Ashraf Gamal, Director of the Egyptian Institute of Directors, Khaled Dahawy, Professor of Accounting at the AmericanUniversity in Cairo, Ramzi Nasrallah, Vice President, Wadi Holdings, and Naheeda Rashid of Hermes Investment Management Ltd. The workshop was led by former Reuters journalist Roger Jeal with help from Munir Boweti, Economic Editor at the Reuters’ Arabic Service in Cairo.
As one of the participants commented afterwards: “In the past we probably wrote stories related to corporate governance but did not realize this. The workshop improved my style of writing about corporate governance.”
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