Current Board of Directors’ Practices in Saudi Corporate Governance: A Case for Reform

This chapter examines the current board of directors’ practices in Saudi corporate governance. It highlights a variety of significant aspects of boards of directors, as internal institutions of the corporate governance system. For example, the chapter contains details of the board members’ duties, the boards’ responsibilities and creation of standards, the separation of the board members’ powers, board membership categories, board meetings, board sub-committees (such as audit committees and nomination and remuneration committees) and board members’ compensations. All these aspects are referenced from the Corporate Governance Code (hereafter CGC), the Company Law (hereafter CL) and the case law connected to them. The paper’s methodology is analytical and adopted a comparative approach with the successful international corporate governance codes, such as the OECD principles of corporate governance, the UK Companies Act, the Cadbury report and the Greenbury report, in order to reform the board of directors’ practices in the Saudi corporate governance framework.