It was produced by a committee set up to assess – even then – the underlying causes behind a number of corporate failures. Since then, attention given to the theme of corporate governance – which has a multidisciplinary nature, bringing together knowledge of economics, finance, accounting, law, management and organisational behaviour – has not stopped growing.
This growing interest is no stranger to the succession of corporate scandals with wide-reaching public repercussions, even before the financial crisis, as was the case of Barings Bank (1995), Enron (2002) and Parmalat (2003) – to name some of the most notorious – which in some way motivated the production of a set of corporate governance best practices by international organisations of note such as the OECD, World Bank and Basel Committee, amongst others.