Executive Summary: The Short Version The US already blocks goods made with forced labour, through the UFLPA and a much older customs law from 1930. The EU joins in from December 2027 with the EU Forced Labour Regulation, which goes one step further and blocks exports too. The tricky part? In practice it's on you, the company, to show your stuff is clean, and that includes inputs from suppliers you've never signed a single contract with. Building that proof eats money and time

Introduction A company's balance sheet is supposed to tell a story people can trust. When that story turns out to be incomplete — or worse, deliberately shaped to look better than it was — the fallout rarely stays contained to the finance team. That's roughly what's playing out with Suzlon Energy right now. A regulatory order has revisited years of the company's financial statements, flagged a set of intra-group transactions and accounting choices and imposed penalties runnin

Introduction Here's the honest truth: most companies today don't have a governance rules problem. They have a governance engagement problem. Indian boardrooms have changed a lot in the last ten years. Disclosures are clearer, committees are better structured, and the role of independent directors is far more clearly defined than it used to be. On paper, governance looks stronger than ever. But we keep running into the same story. A board that ticked every box on the complianc

Executive Summary Not long ago, activist investors were primarily known for challenging boards on financial performance, capital allocation, executive remuneration, or ESG commitments. Today, another issue is moving rapidly up the agenda: artificial intelligence. Across industries, investors are beginning to ask whether companies have a credible AI strategy, whether boards are providing meaningful oversight, and whether AI investments are likely to create long-term shareholde

Every year, companies go public and leave hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars on the table. Not because of bad strategy. Not because of weak fundamentals. But because of how their IPO was priced. The first-day price pop — that celebrated surge in share price when a newly listed company begins trading — is widely treated as a sign of a successful IPO. Champagne is opened. Headlines are written. But for the boards and promoters who actually own that company,

Boardrooms in 2026 are not what they were five years ago. The pressure is different. The risks are bigger. The expectations — from investors, regulators, employees and the public — have gone up in ways that most governance frameworks have not yet caught up with. This blog aims to track boardroom trends closely and the signal coming through clearly this year is this: the boards that will create real long-term value are the ones treating governance not as a checkbox activity bu

Optimism, in the boardroom, can be a dangerous thing. Not because it is wrong to hope — but because hope, unchecked by structural reality, has a way of becoming a substitute for strategy. And nowhere has that substitution been more visible, or more costly, than in the decade-long experiment with shareholder-driven corporate social responsibility. There was a moment — roughly between 2012 and 2019 — when a genuinely exciting idea took root. The idea was this: governments are b

Introduction The Compliance Clock Is Ticking — And Most Boardrooms Aren't Ready The changing landscape of ESG compliance in India is reshaping how companies approach sustainability reporting, risk management and corporate governance. With SEBI strengthening disclosure requirements through frameworks such as BRSR and BRSR Core, ESG is becoming a critical responsibility for boards and independent directors. Picture this. It's a board meeting — somewhere in Mumbai, maybe Bengalu

UAE Corporate Law Amendments: The UAE Just Rewrote the Rules of Corporate Structuring There are moments in a jurisdiction's legislative journey that deserve more than a passing read-through. This is one of them. Federal Decree Law No. 20 of 2025 — the latest set of amendments to the UAE Commercial Companies Law — is not a routine regulatory update. It is, in our reading, one of the most consequential shifts in how onshore UAE companies can be structured, reorganised and trans

Nobody planned for the agenda to change. A board of directors at one of India's largest engineering companies sits down to review quarterly numbers. Standard meeting. Familiar faces. Then someone mentions an enterprise AI licence. Within minutes, the financial review is shelved. The room has moved — to something bigger, faster, and more unsettling than any revenue figure on that slide. This is what AI corporate governance India looks like in 2026. Not a policy document. Not a

Making Changes in the Boardroom: Who should be on the Board? With the increase in digital disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, new regulations, serious threats to cybersecurity, and increasing demands from stakeholder groups, the role of the board director has changed over the past decade from one that had a prestigious status and was primarily filled by founders, top leaders of the organisation, or significant investors to one where now the role includes being actively invo

There's a particular kind of energy in a founder's first pitch meeting — the conviction that the future is already decided and it's just a matter of building toward it fast enough. Walk into most boardrooms a decade later and that energy is often gone. What replaces it is something more careful, more procedural, more focused on protecting what already exists than imagining what could exist next. We don't think this is a coincidence and we don't think it's entirely a bad thing

Executive Summary When people hear AI-driven shareholder activism, they picture a robot hedge fund launching campaigns on its own. That's the wrong thing to worry about. The real shift is quieter and far bigger: artificial intelligence is replacing the referee. In January 2026, JPMorgan's asset-management arm, which oversees more than $7 trillion, dropped its proxy advisors entirely and switched to an in-house AI tool to guide its votes. Here's the part boards aren't ready fo

There's a moment that tends to repeat itself across boardrooms — across companies, sectors and even countries. An independent director asks a fairly simple question — "Who prepared this data and did anyone outside the finance team verify it?" — and the room goes quiet for a second longer than it should. Nobody has a clean answer ready. That pause tells us more about the state of governance risk than any compliance report ever could. This is the thing about governance risk — i

Executive Summary Ten years ago, if you'd told a board that menopause and eldercare belonged on the same agenda as cybersecurity or executive pay, most directors would have laughed you out of the room. Nobody's laughing now. New disclosure rules, evolving employment laws, and a workforce where caregiving responsibilities increasingly overlap with peak leadership years have made menopause and eldercare governance an important part of corporate governance. These issues are movi

Boards have a chicken-and-egg problem they don’t like admitting out loud. Everyone wants directors who arrive with real board experience — someone who’s already sat through a crisis, already navigated a committee fight, already knows how boardroom dynamics actually work versus how the governance textbook describes them. Fine. Except nobody gets that experience without someone giving them a first board seat at some point. And here’s the number that shows how badly boards are h

Ask most boards what “diversity” means and you’ll get the same answer within about ten seconds. Gender. Ethnicity. Maybe nationality if the company operates across a few regions. Rarely does anyone mention how people actually think. That’s odd, when you stop to consider it, because how people think is arguably the whole point of putting more than one person in the room. Here’s a stat worth sitting with. Somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of people are neurodivergent — autis

Executive Summary TNFD is a disclosure framework that helps organisations identify, assess, and report how nature — biodiversity, water, land, oceans — affects their financial position, and how their operations affect nature in return. It was finalised in September 2023, and by early 2026 more than 730 organisations representing over $22 trillion in assets under management had committed to it. What makes this urgent for boards right now isn’t just adoption numbers — it’s that

Executive Summary For a couple of years, "AI governance" at most companies meant one overworked person in legal or compliance quietly adding "and also AI, I guess" to an already full job description. That era is closing out fast. Through 2026, AI oversight has been pulled out of the side-desk pile and turned into a formal executive function, with its own title, its own budget line, and increasingly, its own seat that reports straight to the CEO or the board. I'll be honest ab

Picture the week before a board meeting to approve quarterly results. The finance team is stretched, like always. But this quarter, someone has a shortcut. The first draft of the management commentary, a few footnotes, and the summary for the press release were all produced by an AI tool in about twenty minutes. The team tidied them up. They read well. Honestly, they read better than last year's. The audit committee gets the pack. Nobody mentions the AI. The directors review