Bibliographie sélective OHADA

In publicly held companies where the shareholdership is differentiated from the control and the management of the company, the dispersed shareholding structure prevents the active involvement of the shareholders in the company management while the directors have the opportunity to act in their personal interests. The aforementioned conflict of interest between the shareholders and the directors in the management of the publicly held companies which has been identified as "Principle-Agent Problem" in economic literature has had substantial effect in modern company law. Accordingly, considerable work in the company law has been dedicated to the legal strategies developed to decrease the cost of monitoring directors for shareholders. One of the main corporate governance strategies that is developed to deal with the "Principle-Agent Problem" focuses on increasing the number and the effectiveness of the directors who are not involved in the managing activities of the company. The main principle of this legal strategy is the designing the structure of the board of directors on the basis of team spirit and mutual accountability. In that sense, non-management directors conduct their duties as directors without having management tasks in the company. As these directors work on a part time basis they are not fully depended to the company and in principle they receive symbolic amounts of remuneration. Under this incentive strategy it is accepted that the esteem and reputation that the non-management directors preserve in eye of the public are the main incentives that motivate them to monitor the managing directors. The corporate governance principles are designed as alternative to the rule based regulation approach in company law. The non-management directorship which is introduced as a corporate governance concept for solving the problem of conflict of interest between the shareholders and the directors is the focus area of this thesis. The thesis consists of five parts. In the first part of this study, the concept of corporate governance which is the source of non-management director concept and the conflict of intererest problem between the shareholders and the directors regarding the management of the publicly held companies have been introduced. In this regard, "Centralised Management" and "Principle-Agent Problem" are explained. Finally, based on the "Principle-Agent Problem" the legal theories that are developed to increase the effectiveness of the board of directors, the categorisation of those strategies that has been introduced and place of the non-management directors among those strategies are clarified. In the second part the emergence of the concept of non-management directorship system and the development of the mechanisms for increasing director independence are described and different forms of non-management directors in one-tier board structures are analysed. On this subject the legal designing of the concepts of independent and disinterested directorship which is developed in American law and non-executive directorship which is introduced in the British Law is analysed. In the third part, the concept of the supervisory directorship which corresponds to the non-management directorship in two-tier board system is examined. Forth part of the thesis focuses on the comparison of one-tier and two-tier board structures in application of the non-management directorship concept. Within this scope, it has been analysed whether there is a convergence in the functions of non-management directors in terms of supervision, strategy development and networking in the two types of board systems. Related to this analysis, the effectiveness of the non-management directors in one-tier and two-tier board systems and the role of the institutional investor regarding this effectiveness is evaluated. In recent years, depending on the inclination of convergence in different law systems, there has been an alignment effort in the European Union to have a single set of rules regarding the non-management directors. In this respect as a final focus point, in this part, the regulations of the European Union regarding the non-management directors are examined. The fifth part is dedicated to legal design of the independent directorship which is regulated under the non-management directorship concept in the Turkish law. Turkish Commercial Code is the general code that regulates all joint stock corporations including the publicly held ones. Therefore in order to explain the effects of Anglo-American approach on the administrative organ, the approach of the Turkish Commercial Code regarding the structure and functioning of the board of directors which are based on corporate governance principles are explained. Following that general introduction, the system change regarding the corporate governance principles in Turkey which consists of application of mandatory rules rather than "Comply or Explain" approach that is applicable to independent directors is explained. After that the independence criteria which are set for the independent directors under the capital market regulations for publicly held joint stock corporations and the role of independent directors in decision making mechanism are analysed. Finally, the structure and functioning of the board committees are evaluated by examining the functions of the independent board members.