The Warsaw Stock Exchange in co-operation with Forbes magazine and other Partners initiates a project promoting high standards of responsible management in public companies.
As part of the project, local companies quoted in WSE Main List will be subject to a study covering responsible management practices. Based on the results of the study, the RESPECT Ranking will be created as well as the RESPECT Rating. The end result of this joint project will be Poland’s first stock exchange index of socially responsible companies: RESPECT Index.
The Index will track the performance of companies meeting the highest corporate standards. The Respect Index will be a total return index including dividend income and pre-emptive rights. The WSE will start publishing the Index in the autumn of 2009, when the RESPECT Rating will be announced.
“The Warsaw Stock Exchange undertakes and supports initiatives fostering broadly understood financial market responsibility and information disclosure standards. This valuable initiative comes at a very difficult time when key challenges faced by companies are to maintain their financial viability, their market position and customer base. Corporate social responsibility initiatives typically take a long time to bring profits. It is never too late, nor too early, to promote responsible business, improve the organisational culture of companies, the culture of investment, and high quality of communication with investors as well as other financial market participants. The Index can also be a good tool of promoting the concept of sustainable corporate growth and corporate social responsibility, ideas still hardly known to the general public in Poland.” - Ludwik Sobolewski, President of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, said.