AGC Conference 2024 – Planning your 2025 AGM and reporting agenda

Will Chalk, Ashurst

Will is a Partner in the Corporate practice at Ashurst. He provides corporate governance and compliance advice to UK listed, AIM and larger private companies. This includes advice on directors' duties, FCA Handbook and AIM Rules requirements, narrative reporting obligations and governance code recommendations. He also provides advice on how boards can respond to the increasingly important ESG agenda, including cyber preparedness as well as on live response situations. Will spends a lot of his time delivering induction and update training to individual directors, boards, and senior management teams as well as general counsel and company secretaries.

Eleanor Reeves, Ashurst

Eleanor leads Ashurst's London Environment and Safety practice where she is noted for her ability to advise on the environmental aspects of transactions, including risk management and regulatory compliance concerns. She is particularly recognised for her ESG and sustainability work, and is ranked as a leading individual in legal directories Legal 500 and Chambers & Partners. Her practice includes advising on legal risk management, incident response and crisis management, regulatory obligations and compliance, regulatory investigations and enforcement action including civil and criminal sanctions. Eleanor regularly works with colleagues across our offices on M&A, projects, finance, disputes and investigations, and real estate development and investment matters. She is a member of the UK Environmental Law Association and the UK Health and Safety Lawyers Association.

Florian Drinhausen, Ashurst

Prof Dr Florian Drinhausen is a Partner and Head of the Corporate German practice at Ashurst based in Frankfurt. Florian’s area of expertise is Corporate law, Boardroom advice and Cross-Border M&A. He is also a renowned expert on the European Corporation (SE), having advised on numerous SE creations in Germany. Florian has a distinguished career both in private practice and in various in-house roles. From 2014 until joining Ashurst, he held various senior leadership positions with Deutsche Bank, serving from 2018 as Global General Counsel and Chief Governance Officer of Deutsche Bank. During his time at Deutsche Bank, Florian had responsibility for numerous litigation and regulatory investigation matters, including their settlement, AGM, governance, M&A and corporate matters.

Ruby Hamid, Ashurst

Ruby is Partner in our Dispute Resolution practice at Ashurst. She specialises in global investigations, white collar crime, compliance and risk management. Her technical expertise in bribery and corruption, money laundering, serious fraud and tax evasion supports her practice.

Ruby advises clients across a broad spectrum of regulatory and criminal issues. She is a former prosecutor and spent 13 years at the independent Bar before joining a Magic Circle firm in 2015. She spent a decade leading investigations and prosecutions for the FCA, the National Crime Agency, HMRC, the CPS Specialist Fraud and Serious Crime Units, the FRC and the Environment Agency. She was Panel Counsel for the SFO, General Medical Counsel and the Office of Rail Regulation. She is a highly experienced trial lawyer, having acted as sole advocate in courts of first instance, appellate courts and before a variety of tribunals. This experience underpins the advice she provides and the strategies she employs on behalf of her clients.

She has particular expertise in the financial sector and in oil, gas and mining and infrastructure. She spent 6 years acting for the Financial Conduct Authority, investigating and prosecuting their most serious market abuse and insider dealing cases. She has acted for a number of multinational oil, gas and mining companies facing criminal investigation for corruption in multiple jurisdictions.

A key part of Ruby's practice is compliance and risk management, and she recently spent 6 months seconded to a Fortune 500 company as Head of International Compliance. She advises on financial crime prevention, compliance and corporate governance programmes, responses to new legislation, modern slavery and supply-chain control. 

John Papadakis, Ashurst

John is Senior Counsel in the Incentives practice at Ashurst. John has a broad based employee incentives practice covering all forms of share-related and management incentive arrangements for public and private companies in the United Kingdom and globally. He has extensive experience in setting up tax-advantaged and non tax-advantaged incentive plans, and he advises on the related tax, trust, corporate and securities laws, and on UK corporate governance and institutional investor requirements.

Earlier in his career, John has been contributed to publications, including as primary author of UK Chapter on International Stock Plans: The Practitioner's Guide to Exporting Employee Equity, published on the website of the NASPP (National Association of Stock Plan Professionals), the leading membership association of stock plan professionals in the US. John has also spoken at the the 2013 and 2023 NASPP conferences on Global Roll-Out of Restricted Stock/RSUs and Global Stock Plan Tips.
 

Becky Clissmann, Ashurst

Becky is an environmental lawyer specialising in ESG with a particular focus on sustainability reporting, climate change and the transition to net zero. Becky has over 18 years' experience of climate change, and ESG law and regulation from her roles in private practice and industry including as a Senior Editor in the environment team at Practical Law, Thomson Reuters. Becky obtained extensive experience of climate change policy measures working for the Carbon Trust and as Managing Director of The Chancery Lane Project.

Currently, her practice covers sustainability reporting including TCFD reviews, scoping and implementation of CSRD, CS3D and transition plans as well as helping sustainability teams to prioritise and manage forthcoming ESG regulation.

Becky is a co-convenor of the UK Environmental Law Association's Climate Change and Energy Working Party and a member of The Law Society’s Climate Change Working Group. Becky has completed the University of Oxford Public and Third Sector Academy for Sustainable Finance.

Maria-Laure Knapp, Ashurst

Maria-Laure leads the Ashurst Risk Advisory Climate Change and Sustainability team for the UK and Europe markets. The team provides advice on effective, impactful risk management in relation to sustainability, climate change and social license risks.

Maria-Laure has 20 years’ experience in risk, compliance and sustainability, including extensive work in emerging markets.

She is a qualified lawyer and a member of the Law Society of England and Wales. She has been accredited in ESG Investing by the CFA, and has completed the Certificate in Sustainable Finance from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL).

Maria-Laure has been ranked in Chambers and Partners for 3 consecutive years as a leading expert in ESG and Sustainability in the Crisis and Risk Management category.

Maureen Beresford, Financial Reporting Council

Maureen was a civil servant for over 20 years, mostly within the different guises of the Department for Business Enterprise and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), her last position being Head of Company Law and Reporting. As part of that role she was responsible for a team who informed company law policy and supported Ministers on a number of legislative changes.

In 2017 Maureen moved on secondment to the Financial Reporting Council, working on the review of the UK Corporate Governance Code and then the introduction of the Wates Principles for Large Private Companies. In 2020 Maureen was appointed Head of Corporate Governance at the FRC and recently completed the review of the Corporate Governance Code. Following the retirement of David Styles, Maureen was recently appointed Acting Director, Corporate Governance and Stewardship.
 

Claire Bodanis, Falcon Windsor

Claire is one of the UK’s leading authorities on corporate reporting, and the founder and director of Falcon Windsor, a specialist corporate communications and reporting practice. She came to corporate reporting by way of four years at Cambridge, editing mediaeval texts and honing a love of language and a knack for translating incomprehensible jargon into modern, clear English – the perfect foundation for helping UK plc communicate well with words. Having spent time at two of London’s largest corporate reporting agencies, Claire founded FW in 2004, to help clients find the right way to tell their stories, to the right people. And, thanks to the support of those clients, FW has grown into a network of professionals with expertise in every step of the reporting and communications process, who are united by a love of corporate reporting, and a commitment to delivering thoughtful, truthful communications.

Claire is the co-author of three books with the Dark Angels Collective – the world’s first collective novel, Keeping Mum, published in 2014; Established – Lessons from the World’s Oldest Companies, published in 2018; and On Writing, to which she contributed a chapter on corporate reporting, published in 2019. She is an Associate Partner of Dark Angels, a global network of trainers and writers whose philosophy is that business writing should be more human. In July 2019, the Chartered Governance Institute commissioned Claire to write a book on how to do corporate reporting well. With a foreword by Sir Donald Brydon, and contributions from experts across the reporting world, Trust me, I’m listed – why the annual report matters and how to do it well, was published (second edition) in October 2021.