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For years, interim financial reports in South Africa were regulated by the South African Companies Act No. 61 of 1973 (as amended) (i.e. statutory requirements) and by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) Listing Requirements (i.e. regulatory requirements) only. However, on the international front, major progress was being made in respect of improving the quality of interim financial reporting. South Africa soon followed suit and issued its own accounting statement, AC 127, which is based on the international standard (IAS 34). The School of Accountancy at the University of Pretoria commenced a research project on interim financial reporting in 1997 to investigate compliance with related reporting requirements. This paper is a product of the project. The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to: [a] Compare the requirements stated in IAS 34 and AC 127 with the local regulatory and statutory requirements, to determine whether these requirements are duplicated and to establish in which respect the accounting standards require additional disclosure requirements. [b] Provide an overview of the extent to which companies listed on the JSE adhered to IAS 34 and AC 127 and complied with regulatory and statutory requirements in their interim financial reports in the period 1997 to 1999. [c] Make recommendations regarding the improvement of local statutory and regulatory disclosure requirements.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine SEC rule amendments that permit a mutual fund to use a three‐ or four‐page “summary prospectus” to satisfy statutory prospectus delivery obligations and amendments to a fund's statutory prospectus requirements that require key information in a standardized order at the front of the document.

The approach is to explain the SEC's regulatory changes to the basic mutual fund disclosure documents designed to help investors choose among the more than 8,000 mutual funds.

The investing public's use of the internet for fund research and fund transactions has made it possible for the SEC to take a “layered” approach to disclosure documents, providing an investor with a short‐form document and making available more detailed information on fund web sites. The SEC will likely follow suit with other documents and updated compliance requirements.

The paper will assist fund legal counsel and compliance professionals: to comply with the new statutory prospectus requirements; and to determine whether the summary prospectus is an appropriate disclosure document for a particular fund.

Proposes to treat social law contracts by covering the two most important aspects of the contract of employment, and also the collective agreement. Covers the contract of employment in full with all the integral laws explained as required, including its characteristics, written particulars, sources or regulations, with regard to employers, are also covered. Lengthy coverage of the collective agreement is also included, showing legal as well as moral (!) requirements, also included are cases in law that are covered in depth.

This paper seeks to examine the introduction, in the UK, of reporting on social and environmental matters in the Companies Act 1985 (Operating and Financial Review and Directors' Report etc.) Regulations 2005 and the subsequent changes embodied in the Companies Act 2006. It aims to explore the potential impact of these reporting requirements on corporate legitimacy. Legitimacy is important because it reflects, and arises out of, society's support for the activities of the company.

The paper compares the Companies Act 1985 (Operating and Financial Review and Directors' Report etc.) Regulations 2005 with the Companies Act 2006. A postal survey was used to collect data from 79 companies that were affected by the operating and financial review. The reactions of different stakeholder groups to the changes in the law are assessed using secondary data sources, and issues surrounding legitimacy are analyzed using appropriate literature.

Companies that had to comply with the requirements of the operating and financial review were sufficiently prepared for its implementation and, given the choice, preferred the operating and financial review to be statutory. The authors therefore argue that the reasons for repealing the operating and financial review were overstated. Also, legitimacy theory indicates that the new reporting requirements are unlikely to meet the information needs of all stakeholders.

The paper provides a valuable analysis of how corporate social responsibility, which is deemed to be important for sustainable development, has been incorporated in law. It also provides a valuable analysis of how the law will affect corporate legitimacy.

In this chapter, we explore the legal framework of AGMs in seven Member States (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) of shareholder decision-making rights. We find that, since only a small part of the decision-making rights is harmonized at the European level, there are numerous differences in shareholder rights among national laws. These decision-making rights are usually about the topics director (re-)elections, pay matters, share capital, amendments to articles of association, annual accounts, etc. To be able to conduct empirical research in the remaining chapters, we develop a categorization framework of 15 voting items.

Building operation and maintenance (O&M) service, which embraces a wide range of specialist trades, has been increasingly outsourced through discrete contracts. This paper aims to study the issues critical to outsourced O&M contracts for commercial buildings.

The paper takes a transaction cost approach to analyse the findings from face‐to‐face interviews with 22 O&M practitioners in Hong Kong.

The analysis revealed that they practitioners generally had limited understanding about the concepts of contract. Lacking a standard form for O&M contracts, some contracts were formed rather loosely and irregularities in contract conditions are common. Disputes frequently arise from the scope of work although the practitioners considered well defined work scope is paramount to a successful contract.

Besides the need to study how to improve practitioners' knowledge about O&M service contracts, further studies are required to investigate which or which combination of the contract concepts would be suitable for particular types of O&M contracts where their scale and complexity are dependent on the trade of work required to serve the building.

This paper uncovers a number of contractual issues that are critical to the performance of outsourced O&M service for commercial buildings.

Globally, the governance has shifted from positivist to the regulatory-centric approach, necessitating accurate contouring of regulatory governance framework. The study proposes a novel approach to unravel the regulatory governance framework in the context of the Indian electronics industry – extendable to other sectors in India and other emerging economies.

The research objective has been operationalized through document analysis and thematic analysis of semi-structured interview transcripts in three steps: (1) arrive at parameters of the regulatory governance framework, (2) identify instruments against each parameter and (3) characterize parameters in terms of dominant instruments and their underlying modalities. The authors have adopted a set of 6 Cs modalities (control, communications, competition, consensus, code and collaboration) and regulatory space theory to analyze existing modalities mix in the dominant instruments.

In summary, the study has (1) identified eight macro and twenty micro regulatory governance parameters, (2) mapped regulatory governance parameters with instruments and institutions (3) revealed the top two dominant modalities for each regulatory governance parameter.

The existing modality characteristics of regulatory governance parameters can be used by manufacturers, investors and other stakeholders to make a realistic assessment of regulatory governance and reduce regulatory risk and regulatory burden.

The multidimensional use of parameters, instruments and modalities broadens the understanding of the existing regulatory governance framework and may assist the regulators in optimizing it to meet market requirements.

The purpose of this paper is to explore cultural impact on the harmonisation of Russian Accounting Standards with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

A theoretical review established that differences still exist between the two sets of accounting standards. For decades, Russia was a socialist state of planned economy. Accounting was a tool of centralised control, and accountants had a job of gathering information for statistical purposes of the government and tax authorities. This led to the development of a “Soviet culture” mindset. Accountants saw their jobs as following prescribed rules. Accounting is seen by Hofstede as a field in which historically developed practices are more important than laws of nature. It is therefore expected that accounting rules and the way they are applied will vary among different national cultures. Hence, Gray tried to explore how Hofstede's national cultural dimensions may explain international differences in accounting. With respect to past research in this area, Nobes argued that “national accounting traditions are likely to continue into consolidated reporting where scope for this exists within IFRS rules”. Ding et al. investigated the role of a country's culture and legal origin as an explanation for the differences between local Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and IAS as they were in 2001. The study gathered 53 Russian accountants' attitudes towards reporting under harmonised Russian Accounting Standards through semi structured interviews.

The findings supported the theoretical view of a “Soviet culture” which has an impact on harmonisation of Russian Accounting Standards with the IFRS. Russia's high rankings in such cultural dimensions as power distance, uncertainty avoidance and collectivism have contributed to the development of certain preferences among Russian accountants. Those preferences were for statutory control, uniformity, conservatism and secrecy. Further findings indicate that accountants in Russia display reluctance to disclose financial information to the external users. One of the main reasons was found to be fear of disclosing too much information to competitors. Based on these findings, accountants in Russia display clear signs of preference for secrecy as opposed to transparency, as identified by Gray.

One of the contributions of this study is to examine current perceptions of Russian accountants towards financial reporting under new harmonised Russian Accounting Standards based on Rozhnova's study.

As financial markets across the world become more integrated, the potential for financial shocks to be transmitted both from one jurisdiction to another and from one financial sector to another increases. At the same time differences in national regulatory arrangements can be the source of important competitive distortions between financial institutions. Against this background national authorities have been seeking to coordinate the regulation of securities firms and of banks undertaking securities business. This paper, which is published in two parts, aims to clarify some of the policy issues arising from recent convergence initiatives by examining the US capital adequacy rules for US investment firms and contrasting the US approach with European securities regulation as formulated in the Capital Adequacy Directive. The second part of this paper will be published in the next issue of Journal of Financial Regulation & Compliance.