Paul Lee
Paul Lee is a Director at Hermes Equity Ownership
Services, with overall responsibility for EOS' engagement
internationally on public policy and best practice. His work
involves discussing issues of concern with board members of
companies in client portfolios, with the aim of helping the
companies to change and develop in ways which will add long-term
value for shareholders, as well as engaging with regulators and
policy-makers to ensure the financial system works in the interests
of long-term investors. Paul is also seconded for part of his time
into BTPS Management, which provides the executive investment
oversight of the BT Pension Scheme, the UK's largest. His remit for
BTPS Management is to help ensure that environmental, social and
governance and other long-term factors are integrated into
investment decision-making and fund manager
mandates.
Paul is a member of the UK's Auditing Practices
Board and a non-executive director of Australian engagement firm
Regnan. He is a member of the executive committee (board) of the
Quoted Companies Alliance, having been a member of its corporate
governance committee from 2002 to 2008. He is a participant in the
Corporate Reporting Users' Forum, which tries to influence the
development of accounting standards, as well as a member of the
Financial Reporting and Analysis Committee of the CFA Society of
the UK, and also participates in the Audit Quality Forum and
various of its working groups. He sits on the Financial Reporting
Faculty Advisory Group at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of
England and Wales and is a member of the Private Sector Advisory
Group of the IFC's Global Corporate Governance
Forum.
Paul is the current chair of the International
Corporate Governance Network's Shareholder Responsibilities
Committee and chaired the working group which rewrote the ICGN's
overarching Principles in 2009. He also chaired the consultative
group which developed Guidance on Good Practice in Corporate
Governance Disclosure in developing economies for the UN
Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad). He was a member of
the FRC's working party on Auditor Liability Limitation Agreements,
and of the Consultative Committee for the FSA's review of the
listing regime. Furthermore, he sat on the advisory board of South
Africa's Frater Asset Management from 2004 to
2008.
Paul joined Hermes in 2000. Having graduated with a
first in law from Oxford University, he spent a decade as a
journalist on various specialist legal and financial journals at
Euromoney - including five years as editor of International
Financial Law Review - and the Economist Group, most
recently as managing editor of CFO Europe. He
continues to write, including chapters for various corporate
governance and strategy books (most notably the chapter on Pension
Fund Governance in A Practical Guide to Corporate
Governance) and winning the PricewaterhouseCoopers European
Shareholder Value Award for his article Not badly paid but
paid badly.