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Cadbury Report

British report on corporate governance

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionApr 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ5016276
Source-derived summary

The Cadbury Report, titled Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, is a report issued by "The Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance" chaired by Sir Adrian Cadbury, chairman of Cadbury, that sets out recommendations on the arrangement of company boards and accounting systems to mitigate corporate governance risks and failures.

In 1991 the London Stock Exchange set up the Cadbury committee and the report was published in draft version in May 1992. Its revised and final version was issued in December of the same year. The report's recommendations have been used to varying degrees to establish other codes such as those of the OECD, the European Union, the United States, the World Bank etc.

Background

Sridhar Arcot and Valentina Bruno in their article called "In Letter but not in Spirit: An Analysis of Corporate Governance in the UK" explain the background to the Cadbury Committee. Although wrong on the historical facts, as Robert Maxwell died on 5 November 1991 and "The Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance" known as "The Cadbury Committee" was set up in May 1991 for other reasons than the Maxwell case, it gives an interesting reading of the situation at the time:

Robert Maxwell's death while cruising on the Canary Islands in 1990 shone a spotlight on his company's affairs. A series of risky acquisitions in the mid-eighties had led Maxwell Communications into high debts, which was being financed by diverting resources from the pension funds of his companies. After his disappearance, it emerged that the Mirror Group's debts (one of Maxwell's companies) vastly outweighed its assets, while £440 millions (GBP) were missing from the company's pension funds. Despite the suspicion of manipulation of the pension schemes, there was a widespread feeling in the City of London that no action was taken by UK or US regulators against the Maxwell Communications Corp. Eventually, in 1992 Maxwell's companies filed for bankruptcy protection in the UK and US. At around the same time the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) went bust and lost billions of dollars for its depositors, shareholders and employees.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cadbury Report” as british report on corporate governance. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1991, 1992, 1990—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Cadbury, Report and British can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as british report on corporate governance. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5016276. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1992 and 1990.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Cadbury Report” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.