CGF ARTICLES, OPINIONS & EDITORIALS
Ode to a King (2012-12-04)
February 20,
2015 3754 3754 
So much has been written about corporate governance across the world in recent years; it’s a topic that is guaranteed to be raised by informants and critics when organisations or governments get things horribly wrong.
Under its banner, poor corporate governance issues may include matters such as executive greed, poor leadership, unethical or irregular business or leadership practices, violating legal and policy frameworks, personal conflicts, nepotism, corruption and so the list goes on. Of course, the topic in namesake --
corporate governance -- may be fancy, but simply put it is really about applying good discipline and complying within a set of acceptable practices which meets with the approval of ethically and morally grounded principles. No matter its guise, corporate governance has been in existence for centuries. It is not a foreign concept at all, except that in more modern times, as people have become more entitled to openly air their disapproval toward various matters -- especially when they have been personally aggrieved -- that the topic is raised.
Indeed corporate failures such as the Enron Corporation -- an American energy giant at the time -- showed just how empowered ordinary individuals and employees have become when they voiced their disapproval against the willful and unethical business practices carried out by its leaders, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, who were both aware of the organisation’s accounting loopholes and poor financial reporting, ultimately costing their stakeholders billions of dollars.
Since some of the world’s most spectacular corporate governance scandals, evidenced for example through the cases of HP, Siemens, Arther Anderson, Barings Bank, Fannie Mae, Parmalat and WorldCom, business leaders and civil society have had ample opportunity to understand the main reasons which led to their public exposure, and in most instances their demise. Expectedly, South Africa has also had its fair share of corporate governance scandals and failures, some of these found in the cases of Macmed, Tigon, Regal Treasury, LeisureNet, Saambou and Frankel International & Frankel Chemicals.
Irrespective of where these examples of poor governance may have occurred, albeit locally or abroad, they all have a common thread comprising any one and or all of the following dire components, these including; voracious greed, deceitfulness, people with an insatiable appetite for self-gain and self-preservation, and even outright fraud and corruption.
