Daniela Serban, ARIR: “The business environment is increasingly being put up against the wall by the multiple regulations and legislative changes”
“There are contrasts at the legislative level with this European Green Deal pact and with everything that means transposition into legislation, with non-financial reporting standards on the one hand and companies having this growing pressureon the other hand. But individuals, who are among the biggest polluters, do not have the selective collection of waste guaranteed.
Furthermore, the business environment is increasingly being put up against the wall by the multiple regulations and legislative changes.. Some of them come directly through application through regulations at European Union level, others are transposed into directives and so on. Thus, companies with over 500 employees and those listed on the stock exchange of the same size are required to have this non-financial statement in the annual report. According to the VEKTOR indicator, we see that the number of these companies has increased year by year and in 2021, 40 companies, half of those listed, already had such non-financial information available to the public. In addition , institutional investors require such information and inevitably the company must provide it if it wants to continue attracting investors,” Daniela Serban, President of the Board of Directors, Romanian Investor Relations Association (ARIR) said during Financial Forum 2022 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.
“We supported and still support financial education early on, ideally in primary school.
We see initiatives from the Government to have a platform where companies submit these non-financial reports. Whereas, the European authorities, in which ASF and we are involved, make another consultation, on how to happen the standardization of these non-financial reports. And the fear is that we don’t end up with too many of these levels of reporting. Even the processes of listing on the stock exchange are hampered by these very aspects.
Speaking of cyber-attacks there have been several listed companies targeted that have been with the operations affected by these attacks and are also visible because they report these things.
I would say that the pandemic showed us that it is important to have crisis scenarios and whoever had those crisis scenarios and a good governance, with processes, procedures, resumed their activity very quickly. Romanian companies are increasingly transparent, and this is what the analysis of the VEKTOR indicator that ARIR publishes and is available on the page of each company on the BVB website says. We are talking about an increase on average. If in the first year when we calculated this indicator based on a set of 15 criteria, only 3 companies obtained10, last year 10 obtained 10 and 22 obtained 9. It was an unprecedented effort to open the doors to companies and investors in a very difficult context. But this allowed companies to reach new investors at any time and other markets, to communicate much easier, to participate in a hybrid way to the General Shareholders’ Meetings. Therefore, definitely steps have been taken in this direction, and corporate governance will be green.”
Full recording of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mKuoh09GM4