CORPORATE GOVERNANCE - Case Study Example

Historically, the concept of corporate governance has been at play in most of the United States (US) large companies since the 19th century, and in 2001, with the high-profile collapses of several modern corporations like Enron Corporation, there has been a renewed interest in corporate governance practices (Monks & Minow, 2004). And, as part of the US federal government’s campaign to restore public confidence in corporate governance, it passed the Sarbanes – Oxley Act, which practically set new or enhanced standards for all the US public companies’ boards, management, and public accounting firms through eleven titles or sections including corporate responsibilities and criminal penalties, as well as requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to implement rulings as basis for compliance with the new law (Farrell, 2005).

This paper tackles corporate governance as practiced by Qantas Company in terms of its compliance to the principles and standards of corporate governance best practices, as well its current corporate values and ethics vis-à-vis its corporate governance practices, using the question guides provided for this subject. Qantas Group is an Australian company that has been one of the leaders in the aviation industry, both at the international and domestic fronts. Globally, Qantas has been one of the top six airline companies in the world for the last five consecutive years, based on the Skytrax surveys, and has maintained its four-star official ranking worldwide (Skytrax Survey 2008).

At the domestic level, Qantas is well-known as Australia’s very own, and is very well-supported as a full-service airline. Like the rest of airline companies around the world, Qantas also underwent some tough times, which included an industrial dispute and subsequent maintenance backlogs, and also two in-flight incidents (Qantas Annual Report, 2009). These somehow damaged the