Moulding Corporate Boards: A Key Challenge of Bulgarian Corporate Governance?

The modern corporate governance structure in any country includes as its key factor the structure and functionality of the corporate boards. Currently, the boards experience a more or less radical change of their traditional activities and structure, acquiring new features and diversifying the old ones in order to answer of the raised demand before them by the business and social communities. The paper is revealing the status of the problem in Bulgarian companies within the immediate pre-accession period; it is based on a companies’ survey selected from the main economic sectors. And, the main findings show an inclination of the current boards toward more traditional functionality and conservative structuring, i.e. the boards concentrate more in terms of time and quality to the traditional functions as overall governance and/or operational management and adopt appropriate structures. This also means that the surveyed boards are more reluctant of dealing with the functions like resolving of conflicts of interests and more flexible structuring as creating specialized committees, especially when things come to the nomination and compensation of the board members. Hopefully, the recent amendments of the legal framework in the field will provoke a restructuring and diversification of board functionality toward the highest present-day standards.