| Singapore to enhance corporate governance |
SINGAPORE, June 27 (Xinhua) -- A Singapore senior financial official said Wednesday that both the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Singapore Exchange (SGX) are working on initiatives to enhance corporate governance in Singapore.
Speaking at an Asian corporate governance conference by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Tharman Shanmugaratnam, education minister and second finance minister of Singapore, said the initiatives were among recommendations put forward in a study of corporate governance by Associate Professor Mak Yuen Teen of the Corporate Governance and Financial Reporting Center, commissioned by both MAS and SGX.
Tharman pointed out that one area of improvement is in the training of directors.
He said MAS has been in discussion with the Singapore Institute of Directors on developing a comprehensive and sustained approach to training and development of directors in Singapore.
MAS will help fund a study that will help operationalize this comprehensive approach to training.
The study will look into benchmarking directors' training and development against best practices in other jurisdictions. It will also examine possible collaborative arrangements between a range of organizations and training providers, as well as focus on how best such training initiatives should be financed.
The importance of an effective audit committee in particular was highlighted in the corporate governance study, the minister said.
It noted that almost all corporate scandals involved some form of financial impropriety, with the audit committee often seen to be part of the governance failure.
So Tharman said some guidance on the role, functions and skills required by an audit committee would be useful.
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