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The Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, better known as the Cadbury Committee, was set up in May 1991 to address the concerns increasingly voiced at that time about how UK companies dealt with financial reporting and accountability and the wider implications of this. The Committee was sponsored by the London Stock Exchange, the Financial Reporting Council and the accountancy profession. It published its final report and recommendations in December 1992. Central to these was a Code of Best Practice and the requirement for companies to comply with it or to explain to their shareholders why they had not done so. The recommendations and the Code provided the foundation for the current system of corporate governance in the UK and have proved very influential in corporate governance developments throughout the world. While academics and practitioners have explored and discussed the developments in corporate governance since 1992, little attention has been paid to the processes of code and policy development. This book explores the origins of the Committee, provides rich insights in to the way in which it worked and documents the reaction to the publication of the Committee’s report. The issues which the Committee addressed are still of great concern: the complex relationships through which corporations are held to account have profound effects on all our lives. The Committee provided a framework for thinking about these issues and established a process through which such thinking could be articulated and continue to evolve. This book represents a major contribution to the history of the development of UK corporate governance in the late twentieth century: the why, how, what and when of corporate governance development.

This book contains contributions on aspects of the operation of agency law in commercial contexts by many of the world’s leading experts on the law of agency. It is the product of a conference of the authors held at the University of Nijmegen in November 2014. Contributing authors come from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It comprises 12 chapters in five parts, preceded by a synthesising introduction. The first substantive section is devoted to aspects of general principle, including apparent authority, ratification, undisclosed principals, indirect representation, and unidentified principals. The second section, on Agency in Company Law, is concerned with the status as agents of company directors, liquidators, and receivers. The third section addresses the role of agency law in markets in financial transactions and services, including the relationship between insurers, agents and their customers. There is treatment of the common law, but also of aspects of statutory regimes including the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (UK), Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), and the Insurance Act 2015 (UK). The fourth section is concerned with powers of attorney. The fifth and last section is concerned with private international law, and in particular issues of conflict of laws arising out of the EC Commercial Agents Directive.