Committee for Good Practice fails to impress big business

Only a handful of the 230 publicly traded Polish companies have returned their opinions to the Committee for Good Practice (KRP) on their recen tly-drafted "corporate governance code". The KRP was created by stock market authorities and business organizations to draft the code. "On Western European markets the difference in value of companies abiding by a code of practice and those which do not can reach 18%, while in South America the difference can be as high as 30%," said Krzysztof Lis from the Business Development Institute (IRB). However, the vast majority of companies traded on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) disregarded the initial draft of such a code sent to them two months ago. WSE president Ryszard Czerniawski suggests that one possible reason for limited interest could be the number of rules included in the code - 85 - which, he says, is far too many. (Puls Biznesu, p. 17) T.J.