IRISH COMPANIES have room for improvement on corporate governance, a leading body of accountants determined yesterday.
The Chartered Accountants Ireland Leinster Society decided it would not award the accolade for best corporate governance to any entry in the annual Published Accounts Awards.
This was the first year the organisation had planned to recognise a company specifically for its standards of corporate governance. However, the group’s chairman Paul Kennedy said none of the entries met the required standard of excellence.
According to the judges, Irish companies should “strive for more meaningful and direct communication” in terms of corporate governance, he said.
The annual awards, which are sponsored by the Irish Stock Exchange, are now in their 33rd year. Semi-State companies, plcs, small and medium-quoted companies, and charity and not-for-profit organisations compete.
International construction company CRH, the largest company on the Iseq, was announced as the overall winner yesterday.
Speaking at the awards, Deirdre Somers, chief executive of the Irish Stock Exchange, said Irish companies were operating in an “increasingly comparative market place” and “a very crowded space”. She said that there was “no room or toleration for ambiguity, opaqueness or inaccuracy” in terms of reporting.
Asked about the implications of the decision by two Irish companies, Greencore and McInerney Holdings, to delist from the Irish stock exchange this week, Ms Somers said both developments reflected the economic climate.
“All markets are cyclical . . . companies will delist and relist at different times,” she said. “Greencore is a company that has gone through a number of changes in its history.”
Greencore won the award yesterday, for small/medium quoted companies.
Other winners included Total Produce, which won the enterprise securities market category for the second consecutive year. RTÉ won the statutory unquoted entity award, while Concern was the winner of the charities and not-for-profit organisations sector.
