French Association of Private Companies

Question

In the year 1995, working group of the French chief executive officers was formed by the Confederation of French Industry (CNPF) and the French Association of Private Companies (AFEP) for studying the structure of the French corporate governance. Group has reported the following, among the other things “The board of directors must not simply aim at increasing the share values as in the U.K. and the U.S. Instead, its goal must be to serve the company, interests of those should be clearly distinguished as compared to those of its shareholders, creditors, employees, suppliers and clients however,  still equated along with their general common interest, that is to safeguard the continuity and prosperity of the company”. Talk about the above recommendation of working group.

Answer 1

The recommendations of the French working group apparently show that maximization of the shareholder wealth is not a unanimously accepted aim of the corporate management, mainly outside the United States and probably a few other Anglo-Saxon countries together with the United Kingdom and Canada. To the some extent, this can reflect the fact that share ownership is not a wide spread in most of the other countries. In France, around 15% of households own shares.