The theme of Professor Watanabe’s presentation is the Japan’s Corporate Governance Code (2018 version). The subtitle of this Code is “sustainable growth of the company and improvement of medium- to long-term corporate value”. Therefore, this presentation focuses on what the significance of this Code is, and what issues and problems it has, from the perspective of “sustainable growth of the company and improvement of medium- to long-term corporate value”. The Code is supposed to be revised again in 2021. Professor Watanabe’s presentation will be based on the current 2018 version of the Code, but to the extent possible, it will also mention the direction of the forthcoming revision.

About the Speaker:
Hiroyuki Watanabe is a Professor at the Faculty of Law at Waseda University in Japan (Tokyo) and has been in the current position since 2008. He has been engaged in research and educational activities in the fields of corporate law and capital market law, as well as in the areas of finance law and trust law. While he is interested in cutting-edge issues, he is also very interested in the legal ideas that underlie the events. Under the recent situation where the world is online, he has been actively publishing research results through SSRN (Social Science Research Network) which is a major online international research network.

Discussant:
Christoph Van der Elst is professor of Business Law and Economics at Tilburg University (The Netherlands) and at Ghent University (Belgium). He is a member of the audit committee of the Ghent University Hospital and an independent director of the financial company Aphilion. He has over 25 years of experience as an attorney-at-law, member of the Belgian Bar and he advised many different government agencies at national and EU-level. As an academic, he has held/holds several visiting professorships at Vanderbilt University (US), IDC University (Israel), CLEI-centre, University of Torino (Italy) amongst others. He is an European Corporate Governance Institute research associate. His current research interests are corporate governance and corporate voting, (economic analysis of) company law and the effects of distributed ledger technology, all topics in which he published widely in academic and professional journals. Christoph holds a PhD. in Economics, a master in Law and a master in Economics.