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Associate Professors Dan Puchniak and Umakanth Varottil present at GCGC Conference 2019

June 7, 2019 | Faculty
Associate Professor Dan Puchniak presenting at the 2019 GCGC Conference in Frankfurt

Congratulations to NUS Law Associate Professors Dan Puchniak and Umakanth Varottil PhD ’10 whose co-authored paper “Related Party Transactions in Commonwealth Asia: Complicating the Comparative Paradigm” was among one of the 12 papers selected for presentation at the 2019 Global Corporate Governance Colloquium (GCGC) Conference.

Organised by the European Corporate Governance Institute, this year’s conference was hosted by the Research Center SAFE (Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe) at the House of Finance and Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany on 7 and 8 June 2019.

The conference aims to attract current research papers of the highest scholarly quality in the field of corporate governance. It is primarily an “academic to academic” event with some participants from industry and the public sector including the practitioner partners of GCGC and other invited panelists.

The GCGC is a global initiative to bring together the best research in law, economics and finance relating to corporate governance at a yearly conference held at 12 leading universities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.

L-R: Co-authors Associate Professor Dan Puchniak and Associate Professor Umakanth Varottil PhD ’10

About the paper

The World Bank’s influential Doing Business Report (DBR) has been a key platform for the American-driven dissemination of global norms of good corporate governance.  A prominent part of the DBR is the related party transactions (RPT) index, which ranks 190 jurisdictions from around the world on the quality of their laws regulating RPTs.  In their article “Related Party Transactions in Commonwealth Asia: Complicating the Comparative Paradigm”, Puchniak and Varottil use empirical, case-study, and anecdotal evidence to illuminate fundamental flaws in the RPT Index. This research has real world implications as jurisdictions – especially developing ones – commonly look to the RPT Index when reforming their laws. It also has significant academic importance as the RPT Index – which their article challenges – is based on one of the most cited pieces of comparative corporate law scholarship.

Watch the full presentation.