‘Hire and fire’ of State-Owned Enterprise boards

Wednesday, 21 January 2015 00:49 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

With every regime change, the entire board of most major State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) are ‘sacked’ and replaced with an entirely new board, often with no formal transition or ‘knowledge transfer’ process. This can be detrimental to the business. However, two effective practices that can be considered are:

nUnder the auspices of the Auditor-General, the Government should recruit a pool of professional non-executive directors, who can be rotated among the SOEs. They should be truly independent and cannot be politically dislodged. This can be in addition to the political appointees (if they must really resort to that!). nMake it a compulsory legal requirement for any outgoing SOE board to formally hand over a report and conduct a closing presentation for the incoming board – in the presence of an independent auditor. May sanity prevail, while the politicians avail!

‘Hire and fire’ of State-Owned Enterprise boards

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