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Lord Mandelson Mansion House speech; Lord Mandelson speech SOT - Christopher Hogg's review of corporate governance and David Walker's review of banking boards have started to pose the right questions. The UK's Stewardship Code must emerge stronger from the current consultation. It should make it clear that subscribing fund managers and ultimate owners have a duty of engagement and that long term stewardship must be at the centre of the fund manager’s mandate, and that indeed, this has to be demonstrated in reporting. I think there is a case for making fund managers publish the terms under which they are paid and the goals they are working to. - In this context, I think we need a fresh look at mergers and acquisitions. In some ways the current system is good at defining director and shareholder duties where the ownership is relatively stable. It is less clear how those duties should be interpreted in the fast-moving circumstances of a takeover. Nobody believes that poorly performing management should be protected. But the open secret of the last two decades is that mergers too often fail to create any long term value at all, except perhaps for the advisors and those who arbitrage the share price of a company in play. A lot of M&A advisors must be sleeping badly in that knowledge. Or maybe not. And it seems to me that given that a takeover can have huge implications for workforces and communities as well as investors, this is an area where good governance, and active and responsible shareholding, are absolutely critical. I do believe that there is a strong case for throwing some extra grit in the system. This is true for us in particular because the UK has a very open market for corporate control, arguably the most open in the world. And it is in our interest to make sure that this openness is producing sound outcomes. In the case of Cadbury and Kraft it is hard to ignore the fact that the fate of a company with a long history and many tens of thousands of emp...