Tom Young
Asia editor
Companies in Asia are stretched. A flood of new legislation has increased the burden of compliance, taking up time and resources that should be spent improving corporate governance standards. With the market distressed, investors are looking for clues to the next casualty, and there is a danger that poor corporate governance could attract both short selling and activist hedge funds. Even companies with strong corporate governance are having problems. Many risk falling foul of laws such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
As IFLR's first annual Asian Corporate Counsel Poll shows, compliance and corporate governance are the chief problems facing Asian corporates. IFLR polled in-house lawyers at some of the largest corporations in Asia on a set of questions put together by their peers: a panel of in-house corporate counsel, with the help of Clifford Chance. As with all IFLR polls, the survey was conducted on an...