About Paul Sarbanes

Paul Sarbanes is the co-author of the Sarbanes –Oxley Act and former Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs

When the Act, engineered by Senator Paul Sarbanes and Congressman Mike Oxley, was signed into law in 2002, President George W. Bush called it ‘the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt’. Coming after the corporate and accounting scandals surrounding the high profile collapse of Enron, Tyco International, Peregrine Systems and Worldcom, the Act enjoyed overwhelming support from both Democrat and Republican legislators. 

Paul Sarbanes has spent nearly four decades in American national politics, first as a member of the US House of Representatives and then as a member of the US Senate. One of the longest serving and most influential Senators in post-war America, Paul Sarbanes has chaired the immensely powerful Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, which has jurisdiction over matters related to banks and banking, price controls, deposit insurance, federal monetary policy, financial aid to commerce and industry, issuance of redemption of notes, currency and coinage.

The effects of his legislations continue to reverberate in corporate boardrooms around the world, and there are no indications that this will abate in the foreseeable future. We want Paul Sarbanes to share his perspective on the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act on corporate governance and financial transparency in Asia and to drill into specific titles of the Act that most affects Asian corporates.

Now that the Act is being enforced by the regulators, the burning question is whether it can really effectively prevent future corporate and accounting scandals from happening or is it merely an additional layer of unnecessary bureaucracy that restricts corporations from maximising shareholder value. With Paul Sarbanes providing a candid analysis of the Act, this thought provoking dialogue will benefit a wide range of business leaders - from the chairmen of multinationals to owners of small homegrown Asian companies.



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