Management commentary

Date recorded:

Oral update

The staff provided the Board with an oral update of the project and a summary of the input received from their meeting with the Management Commentary Consultative Group in early April.

Members of the consultative group agreed that staff has correctly identified the challenges the project needs to address and agrees with the direction of their proposed approach.        

Staff highlighted a few key messages that emerged from the group meeting, including: emphasis on value creation, discussion of opportunities in addition to risks, coherence of messaging, enhanced prominence of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) issues, dealing with commercially sensitive information and the effective use of cross-referencing both within a single filing and to other reports and sources of information.

Staff reiterated that their objective was to provide guidance of what should be included within management commentary rather than to mandate the structure thereof.

Staff intends to bring papers to the Board for discussion at their May 2019 meeting.

Discussion

Based on these updates, one Board member asked whether the discussions with the consultative group around cross-referencing had been useful for the staff. Staff responded by saying that the discussions had re-emphasised that management commentary should include only relevant and material information but that cross-referencing to other sources could be effective in some instances to support the information provided.

Finally, the Board raised a concern regarding the conciseness of management commentary based on the number of items considered to be important by the consultative group.

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