Big companies conspicuous by their absence from corporate governance rankings

Companies including Ford, Viacom and BMW are conspicuous by their absence from a table ranking companies’ corporate governance standards. FTSE Group, the index provider, and Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the global consultancy, have unveiled the first phase of an index that ranks companies according to their corporate governance standards.

The Corporate Governance Index (CGI) assesses 60 governance issues under five main themes ? boardroom structure, audit, executive compensation and takeover provisions. Using this data, each company is then rated on a scale of one to five.