Corporate governance gets more transparent worldwide - USATODAY.com

Corporate governance gets more transparent worldwide - USATODAY.com:

"In what some call a worldwide corporate-governance movement, shareholders are pushing for stronger corporate-governance laws, teaming with investors from different countries....
'We've seen some dramatic changes,' says Stanley Dubiel, head of governance research at RiskMetrics Group, the largest U.S.-based proxy research firm, with offices in 50 countries. 'There's a strong desire on the part of many companies to attract capital from international investors...

[Later in the same article]

Dozens of countries are developing systems of watchdog corporate-governance and shareholder activism, with some modeling themselves after U.S. and United Kingdom governance practices or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the U.S. anti-fraud law passed after the Enron accounting scandal six years ago led to the demise of the company.

South Africa, Italy and Japan, for instance, have recently beefed up their corporate-governance codes to strengthen shareholders' oversight '"