Corporate Governance: Committing to Stakeholders

Sanjiv Mehta, Executive Chairman of L Catterton India, Chairman of L Catterton Asia, and former Chairman, CEO, and Managing Director of Hindustan Unilever Limited (2013–23), explains that corporate governance is about running companies with honesty, fairness, accountability, and responsibility.

In his keynote address at the IiAS CG Event 2025, He emphasizes that strong governance builds trust, improves performance, ensures compliance, and supports long-term sustainability. Drawing from Indian epics, history, and philosophy, he links modern governance to values such as dharma, integrity, empathy, justice, wisdom, and accountability.

Mehta also traces the evolution of corporate governance in both the Anglo-Saxon world and India through key reforms, major scandals, and important regulations, including the Cadbury Report, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Companies Act 2013, and the Kotak Committee recommendations.

He identifies continuing challenges in India, such as insider trading, weak board independence, poor transparency, limited diversity, weak enforcement, and superficial CSR. Looking ahead, he calls on companies to strengthen governance around AI, sustainability, and stakeholder interests, while balancing people, planet, and profit through a purpose-led approach.

The above is the text of the talk delivered by Sanjiv Mehta at the IiAS CG Scorecard event in Mumbai, on 11 April 2025.

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The Indian Corporate Governance Scorecard (Scorecard) provides a standardized and objective evaluation framework which can be used by companies, regulators, and other stakeholders to assess companies’ corporate governance practices. For the most part, the benchmarks embedded in the Scorecard are independent of regulatory requirements – helping market participants approach governance as a principle-driven, and not compliance, exercise.

Based on the G20-OECD Principles of Corporate Governance, the Scorecard was originally developed by Institutional Investor Advisory Services India Limited (IiAS) jointly with International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The original project was supported and sponsored by the Japan Ministry of Finance. The current derivative framework has been developed by IiAS in January 2025

Read more about the Governance Scorecard: here