A lecture by Dr. Dan W. Puchniak from Singapore Management University, as part of a mentoring visit

25 10 2024

The Faculty of Law and Administration are pleased to invite you to a lecture by Dr. Dan W. Puchniak from Singapore Management University entitled “Corporate Purpose. Some Comparative Remarks”.

The lecture will be held in English on November 6 (Wednesday) at 5:00 p.m. in hybrid form: in room 3.4 of building d. CIUW (Central Campus, ul. Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28) and online (Zoom: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/85677648510/).

Dr. Dan W. Puchniak is a Professor in the Yong Pung How School of Law (YPHSL) at Singapore Management University, the Director of the YPHSL Centre for Commercial Law in Asia, the Inaugural Director of the Asian Corporate Law Forum, and a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). He is an internationally recognized scholar in the field of comparative corporate law and governance, with a focus on Asia. He has received numerous domestic and international awards for his academic research and teaching – most recently, the 2023 ECGI Cleary Gottlieb Law Prize. His research has been profiled in The Economist, The Japan Times, and The Business Times. He has taught and given over 100 invited lectures at leading universities, government institutions, international organizations, stock exchanges, and companies around the world on comparative corporate law and governance. He has advised international organizations on the development of corporate law in Asia, served as an expert in high stakes complex corporate law disputes in Asia, and previously practiced corporate commercial litigation in one of Canada’s leading law firms.

Viewed through an Anglo-American lens, corporate governance around the world is living a woke moment. Anglo-America’s recent “discovery” that corporations have stakeholders (other than shareholders) and purposes (other than maximizing shareholder value) is hailed as a corporate governance solution that can deliver global prosperity. However, this lecture demonstrates that long before Anglo-America’s “discovery” of corporate purpose, Asia was already awake to it. It describes how Asia’s most important and dynamic economies – which are the world’s engine for economic growth – have been built on systems of corporate governance where corporate purpose and stakeholderism reign supreme.

This positive claim has important normative implications. The Anglo-American movement to push corporations around the world to be more purposeful is likely to have deleterious effects in Asia where corporations already tend to have too many purposes. Under the guise of embracing the Anglo-American corporate purpose movement, entrenched stakeholders may resist reforms to reduce rent seeking, wealth tunnelling, and protect (minority) shareholder interests.

A proper understanding of the history of corporate purpose in Asia demonstrates that different jurisdictions have different understandings of the purpose that corporations should serve and that there is no one model that fits all. At any given time, each jurisdiction will be at a different point along the shareholder-primacy/stakeholderism continuum. How this is achieved will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and within each jurisdiction over time. Ultimately, prosperity requires diversity.

The lecture has been prepared as part of a mentoring visit through Action I.1.1/IV.1.1 “Mentoring Programme”.