JUDICIAL FEDERALISM IN THE ECJ'S BERLUSCONI CASE: TOWARD MORE CREDIBLE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND FINANCIAL REPORTING?

摘要

In recent years, the general public in many countries has become increasingly aware of issues concerning business accounting and financial reporting. Americans hardly need to be reminded of the Enron debacle, where members of the company's senior management engaged in fraudulent off-balance sheet transactions to disguise the true state of the company's financial condition, a scheme that auditors failed to uncover until the company's implosion. This and other major corporate governance cases involving questionable or fraudulent accounting practices led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This law was an unprecedented Congressional intervention into corporate governance, an arena that had previously been left largely to Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") rules and professional self-regulation (e.g., auditor independence requirements), or to state corporate law (e.g., requirements for board committees and their composition).