regulate corporate governance were futile because of differences in national culture. He drew particular attention to
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and International Corporate Governance
Network (ICGN) codes, saying that they were, ‘silly attempts to harmonise practice’. He said that in some countries,
for example, there were ‘family reasons’ for making the chairman and chief executive the same person. In other
countries, he said, the separation of these roles seemed to work. Another delegate, Alliya Yongvanich, said that the
roles of chief executive and chairman should always be separated because of what she called ‘accountability to
shareholders’.
One delegate, Vincent Viola, said that the right approach was to allow each country to set up its own corporate
governance provisions. He said that it was suitable for some countries to produce and abide by their own ‘very
structured’ corporate governance provisions, but in some other parts of the world, the local culture was to allow what
he called, ‘local interpretation of the rules’. He said that some cultures valued highly structured governance systems
while others do not care as much.
Required:
(a) Explain the roles of the chairman in corporate governance. (5 marks)