The Conference

The International Corporate Governance Society (ICGS) welcomes you to its third conference which will be hosted by LUISS University and LUISS Business School in Rome, Italy, September 2-3, 2017.

The Harold S. Geneen Institute of Corporate Governance at Bentley University will be the primary corporate sponsor of this conference

The theme of the conference will be: “Corporate power and corporate governance: Balancing value creation with stakeholder accountability.”

The focus of the conference is how to balance shareholder value creation and accountability towards multiple stakeholders.

Keynote Speaker

Franklin Allen

Franklin Allen is Professor of Finance and Economics and Executive Director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London and has held these positions since July 2014.  He was on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from July 1980 – June 2016. He now has Emeritus status there. He was formerly Vice Dean and Director of Wharton Doctoral Programs, Co-Director of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and is currently Managing Editor of the Review of Finance.  He is a past President of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Society for Financial Studies, the Financial Intermediation Research Society and the Financial Management Association, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.  He received his doctorate from Oxford University.  Dr. Allen's main areas of interest are corporate finance, asset pricing, financial innovation, comparative financial systems, and financial crises.  He is a co-author with Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers of the eighth through twelfth editions of the textbook Principles of Corporate Finance.

Our distinguished panel plenary will have the following guest speakers:

Kristin Holter

Managing director/partner at Stakeholder AS.

Kristin Holter is managing director at Stakeholder, a Norwegian consultancy specializing in how businesses can prosper by using CSR as a base for both improved performance and reputation. Holter holds an MA in International Human Rights and has in-depth knowledge of the main CSR frameworks, such as the OECD Guidelines for Responsible Business Conduct, the UN Guidelines for Business and Human Rights, the UN Global Compact, ISO 26 000, and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). She is a contributor to practical guides: "Gap-analysis tool to the OECD Guidelines"; "A Practitioner's Guide to Ethical Trade" and "Ethical Requirements in Public Procurement.".

John Plender

Journalist at FT, BBC and Channel Four.

John Plender, following his degree at Oxford University, joined Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths & Co. in the City of London in 1967, qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1970. He then moved into journalism and became financial editor of The Economist in 1974, where he remained until joining the U.K. Foreign Office policy planning staff in 1980. On leaving the Foreign Office, he became a senior editorial writer and columnist at the Financial Times. A past chairman of Pensions and Investment Research Consultants, the U.K. shareholder activist and corporate governance consultancy, John Plender served on the U.K. government’s company law review steering group, which provided the basis for the Companies Act 2006. He joined the board of Quintain PLC as a non-executive director in 2002 and chaired the company from 2007 to 2009. He is also a trustee of the Pearson Group Pension Fund, which manages assets worth £2.3 billion. He is the author of Going Off The Rails—Global Capital and the Crisis of Legitimacy (John Wiley, 2003).

Peter Montagnon

Associate director of the Institute of Business Ethics.

Peter Montagnon is Associate Director of the Institute of Business Ethics. He also serves as a member of the corporate governance advisory board of the Norges Bank Investment Management, as well as on the Board of the Hawkamah Institute, Dubai. He was recently elected to an expert committee formed by Sika AG in Switzerland to monitor conflicts of interest and related party issues connected with the hostile bid for that company by St Gobain. Previously he held senior governance-related positions at the Association of British Insurers and the Financial Reporting Council. As a journalist at the Financial Times for two decades his assignments included Head of the Lex Column, Asia Editor and Capital Markets Editor. He is a past chairman of the International Corporate Governance network and was a member of the European Corporate Governance Forum from 2006 to 2011.

Praveen Kumar

Cullen Distinguished Chaired Professor of Finance and the co-Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR)

He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and his Bachelors (with Honors) and Masters in Public Administration from Princeton University. His research has been widely published in the top international journals in finance, economics, management, and accounting such as Journal of Finance, American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting Review, Management Science, Strategy Management Journal, CGIR, and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. His research has been cited and discussed in major business publications like Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg News. He has received numerous awards for his research such as the Chicago Board of Trade Awards for the Best Paper in Options and Futures by the Western Finance Association and the McGraw-Hill Award for the Best Finance Paper by the Association of Business Disciplines.