7th Annual ICGN Corporate Governance Conference in Tokyo, July 11 to July 13

The International Corporate Governance Network (“ICGN”) has decided in its Business Meeting, held in New York on July 14 2000, that the 7th Annual Conference be held in Tokyo in 2001. The ICGN is an international organization aiming to promote corporate governance principles around the world.

The Tokyo Stock Exchange (“TSE”) and the Japan Corporate Governance Forum (“JCGF”) will co-sponsor the ICGN 7th Annual Conference, which will be the first ICGN Annual Conference in Asia.
The ICGN was founded by leading institutional investors and corporate governance experts around the World.

They include the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), the College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA - CREF) and Hermes etc. It provides a unique forum, not only for exchanging views on corporate governance but also for promoting mutual understanding between issuers and institutional investors.

The ICGN has held its Annual Conference every year in one of the major cities in the world. The 2001 Conference in Tokyo will follow those held in Washington DC (1995), in London (1996), Paris (1997), San Francisco (1998), Frankfurt (1999) and New York (2000). Its activity has generated significant impact on the development of international corporate governance practices, regulations and codes of conduct. For example, the Statement of ICGN Global Share Voting Principles adopted on July 10, 1998 at its Annual Conference has been reflected in the “OECD Principles of Corporate Governance”. The total amount of funds held by the ICGN members has swelled to over 10 trillion US dollars.

See their web site http://www.tse.or.jp/icgn/ for more details

COMMENT FROM ONE OF OUR SUBSCRIBERS WHO ATTENDED THE EVENT:

ICGN was good, mostly from a networking point of view but unfortunately there was nothing on SRI at all. There were references from Japanese corporates about the importance of employees but this was about as far as it went. Most of the conference was about Japanese governance and what needs
to change.