The recent scandal involving Adani Group and Canadian pension fund CPDQ exposes flagging standards as investors rush for private markets across emerging markets in Asia. […] François Dauphin, who leads the Montreal-based Institute for governance of private and public organisations, identifies a concerning trend. He notes the investors’ due dilligence is suffering under pressure to […]

To listen to the full panel with Louis Audet (board member of IGOPP), about the most recent report of IGOPP on family businesses, please click here or on the image below (the panel’s duration is 43 minutes):

To listen to the full panel with Louis Audet (board member of IGOPP), about the most recent report of IGOPP on family businesses, please click here or on the image below (the panel’s duration is 43 minutes):

A leading investors’ rights group in Quebec is pressing publicly traded Canadian companies to reveal what languages their board members speak, saying the disclosure is needed to ensure rising expectations for corporate diversity are being met. The call comes from Montreal-based Mouvement d’éducation et de défense des actionnaires, known as Médac. The group says the […]

For 40 years or so, corporations listed on stock markets were expected to pursue diligently, if not exclusively, value creation for their shareholders. A number of factors had pushed corporations away from an earlier “stakeholder model,” prime among them the revolution in executive compensation. Then, in the new century, a perennial criticism of business corporations […]

Human beings are wonderful amnesiacs, an observation grounded in the history of traumatic events which have faded gradually into oblivion. That may well be the case with the current pandemic. For instance, how did societies, corporations and their governance system cope with recent dramatic events (so called “Black Swans” or for the more statistically inclined […]

Excerpted and translated from “Le fiasco SNC-Lavalin: crime, culture, governance?” by Yvan Allaire, executive chairman of the Institute for Governance of Private and Public Organizations, published in Policy Options March 18, 2019.  The tragedy of SNC-Lavalin was in the making between 2000 and 2012. To outside observers, these were years of quiet profitability for the […]

In Ottawa, there appears to be little sympathy these days for SNC-Lavalin, the giant engineering corporation facing prosecution for bribery schemes in Libya. The company was hoping to strike a deal with federal prosecutors in order to avoid a trial. If guilty, it would be cut off from lucrative Canadian government contracts for a decade. […]

The long series of scandals ensnaring SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.  has one former executive of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec calling for more accountability when it comes to corporate bribes for global contracts. Michel Nadeau, a former deputy chief executive of Caisse – the largest shareholder in SNC – told BNN Bloomberg on […]

After some 15 years of tweaking and polishing the theory and practice of “good” governance, perfectly independent board members remain surprise-prone, estranged from the goings-on in the company, partially informed and lacking the wherewithal to challenge management. No doubt that the legitimacy and credibility of boards have suffered as a result. In the current age, […]

“[…] As the argument goes, SNC-Lavalin is too big to fail. That line of reasoning saved American banks when they created a housing bubble only to have it burst in their face. It also sparked the multi-billion-dollar bailout of North American car companies when the global economy tanked. “There are hundreds if not thousands of professionals […]

“Half of Quebec’s 50 biggest publicly traded companies are vulnerable to foreign takeover attempts, new research suggests. It’s a statistical call to arms from a leading corporate expert who argues Quebec is doing the right thing in taking national ownership of the “say no” fight after Ontario ignored it for years. Yvan Allaire, a former […]