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The ICGN conference in London celebrated the twentieth anniversary of this organization bringing together about 500 delegates mostly representatives of investors at the city-hall of the London city, the famous Guild Hall. This set of buildings dating back to the thirteenth century brought together the craft guilds of the old capital city of the world trade and has always housed an entrepreneurial spirit. See our pictures.
Kerrie Waring, the efficient director of the ICGN network currently chaired by Erik Breen of Triodos, had called the conference celebrating the creation twenty years ago in Washington D.C. this international association.
Anne Simpson, earlier founder of PIRC and then later head of engagement at CalPERS received ICGN Life Time Achiever Award.
Under the talented moderation of the always young and charming Sophie L’Helias, which at the time was in 1995 at Déminor, some of the 1995 founders were invited to comment facing the founding father Bill Crist, at the time the chairman of the CalPERS Board : Sarah Teslik, former host of the Council of Insitutional American Investors (CII) the head of responsible investments CalPERS, Anne Simpson, the former head of JP Morgan managements and director of the National Association of Pension Funds UK (NAPF), Geoff Lindey, and Proxinvest Chairman
Pierre-Henri Leroy, raised the creation of the ICGN, its achievements and challenges for the future.
For the latter, the greatest merit of the ICGN, founded by Bill Crist (hereunder left), André Baladi, and Richard Regan (hereunder right) , is certainly to have formalized a set of principles of good governance which is today the best reference. His weakness is not to have yet denounced the perversity of the universal banking model and its very damaging consequences for governance, market fairness, economic growth and employment.
The conference itself developed the next two days the important current issues such as shareholder loyalty, financial regulation, the proper administration of Directors, the use of collective repair pathways, the integration of environmental factors, in reporting, the alignment of the interests of asset-managers interests with those of investors, the statutory auditors certification requirements, the cyberfragility, the proper execution of voting by the interbank chain, the promotion of a resilient capital market, the investors engagement with issuers…
The Associate Editor & Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times , the famous Martin Wolf, recommended “Opportunist Shareholders must embrace commitment” … a late discovery which has always been widely accepted by serious investors. But the most impressive were the words of the keynote adress by the great Robert Monks, the father of the ERISA regulations in the USA and the
historical founder of ISS. ”
“That a Supreme Court Justice could actually argue, as Anthony Kennedy did (in Citizens United), that there exists “little evidence of abuse that cannot be corrected by shareholders through the
procedures of corporate democracy” shows how far we have sunk into a Never-Never
Land of convenient “truths” and rosy shibboleths. 
