The Institutional Shareholder – Best Practice: the National Investment Funds’ experience

One of the most important achievements of the National Investment Funds’ Programme – the implementation of the Mass Privatisation Programme – is its input into the process of building a Polish corporate governance infrastructure. Experience in the creation and operation of corporate governance systems as accumulated by the National Investment Funds (NIFs) is a valuable source of knowledge on a group of shareholders in Polish companies that is continuously expanding and diversifying in terms of identity. The action model applied to the National Investment Funds made possible the collecting of the first Polish experiences regarding the behaviour of institutional investors in supervisory processes. In its turn, the positioning of the Funds in such a role matched observations of world trends where ownership functions are concentrating in the hands of institutional investors. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the experience of National Investment Funds in the context of the achievements of institutional investors acting in mature market economies in the realm of corporate governance. Experience accumulated by the NIFs shows that the process of building efficient corporate governance structures is not a simple task. Analysis of their achievements in safeguarding their interests from the point of view of the institutional investor has confirmed the importance of an active stance in this sphere.