ACGA: CG in Malaysia improving (2)

I wrote about this excellent regional Corporate Governance report before. This time I like to zero in on the disclosure of enforcement.

The relevant text in the CG Watch 2014 report is as follows:

I respectfully disagree with the above findings, especially the part about easy and logical access to enforcement information (one of the rare times I disagree with in the report).

Most likely the researchers looked from the angle of enforcement. But the angle which investors and market observers really want to use is (as so often) conveniently shown at David Webb's website:

A simple box at the top of the website, where one can search for enforcement news regarding a company or person.

Lets take an example, stock code 0010, Hang Lung Group Limited:

There are many ways to look at the data, but the beauty of the "Officers"-tab is that all the names of the people involved (either current or historic) are "clickable".

If we click for instance on "Chan, Ronnie ChiChung" then we get the following information:

That is a really helpful way for people to quickly get a grasp about both a company and its officers: have there been any issues in the past? Have the officers previously worked for other companies with issues?

Unfortunately, both the enforcement website of Bursa and Securities Commission don't even come close to this level of sophistication.

Things could be improved if Bursa would add all enforcement actions in their own announcements website under a separate category, where all enforcement news would appear, both from Bursa Malaysia and the Securities Commission grouped together, linked to the relevant company.

Despite having an otherwise excellent announcement website (I can't stress this enough, it is much better than all other announcements websites that I frequent), there is always room for improvement I guess.

I hope to continue to write more about the CG Watch 2014 report, which is in general quite positive about the CG developments in Malaysia.