Corporate Governance and Ownership Structure in the Top 30 Listed Non Financial Companies in Poland

Magdalena Popowska

Corporate Governance and Ownership Structure in the Top 30 Listed Non Financial Companies in Poland

Abstract

This paper offers a first analysis of the relationships between corporate governance models and rules and ownership structure of the top 30 Polish firms listed at the WSE (not considering foreign firms and/or the Polish branches of foreign firms listed at the same stock exchange, nor the financial companies and the banks). The general picture depicted by this analysis is putting into evidence the increasing importance of institutional investors (such as pension funds, mainly controlled by big foreign financial institutions). Their role is contributing – as in many other European financial market – to introduce a higher level of efficiency and a wider disclosure of information within a system where the highly concentrate ownership structure of most of these firms permitted until a recent past – and to some extent still permits - a relatively low level of transparency. Another relevant result of this analysis is the increasing similarity of the Polish ownership structure of the biggest listed companies to some other models, like the German one, where a cross shareholding structure among big groups and/or big block holders cohabits with another model where the ownership structure still depends very much on the role of the family or of the group of founders. Both cases contribute to a very strong stabilization process of the ownership structure of the top 30 Polish firms. If this is self-evident in case of some oil and/or energy companies, still largely controlled by the State, it offers a new image of corporate Poland more than twenty years after the beginning of the transition to a market economy.

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Magdalena Popowska dr

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Category:: Conference activity
Type:: publikacja w wydawnictwie zbiorowym recenzowanym (także w materiałach konferencyjnych)
Title of issue:: An Entreprise Odyssey: Leadership, Innovation and Development for Responsible Economy strony 1098 - 1114
Language:: English
Publication year:: 2014
Bibliographic description:: Popowska M.: Corporate Governance and Ownership Structure in the Top 30 Listed Non Financial Companies in Poland// An Entreprise Odyssey: Leadership, Innovation and Development for Responsible Economy/ ed. Lovorka Galetic, Mario Spremic, Jurica Simurina Zagrzeb: Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, 2014, s.1098-1114
Verified by:: Gdańsk University of Technology