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There is a new category for the Corporate Governance Award 2005, an annual event organised by Malaysian Business which has entered its fourth year. It's called CSR -- Corporate Social Responsibility.

The award criteria for this new category is based on the response given by the companies in their CSR activities via voluntary disclosure. Apart from submitting their annual reports, which are tabled at AGMs, the companies are required to have responded to questionnaire from the Award organisers on their adherence to good corporate governance practices. For this purpose, all PN4 and PN10 companies have been excluded.

Further more, companies must not be engaged in any business deemed harmfult o the environment.

In 2005, there were about a thousand companies listed on the Main Board, Second Board and Mesdaq of Bursa Malaysia. Of the companies that have responded to the Award questionnaire, 50 were short-listed after a process of elimination. As a final hurdle, their latest return on equity (RoE), as a measure of enhancing shareholder value, was considered. The results were vetted by audit firm, KPMG.

The finalists, in alphabetical order, were Chemical Company of Malaysia Berhad, LPI Capital Bhd, Maybank, Public Bank, Sunway Group, Telekom Malaysia, and Mesdaq's YTL e-Solutions

In his welcome speech, Malaysian Business editor, Charles Raj, gave a context to the number of companies that have responded to the questionnaire and given voluntary disclosure of their CSR track records, which are in their rare few.

Are Malaysian companies generous in making money from the public and reward it?

Raj summed it in one Malay word in his English speech: Kededut.

And you know which listed companies, that have been milking the consuming public, didn't even make it to the finalists' list but made a hell of a noise -- the type that peribahasa says 'telur sebiji, riuh sekampung'.