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 CLIENT CASE STUDY - WALTER DIVERSIFIED SERVICES - MAY 2007
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During 2006, as Walter Diversified Services Ltd (WDS) prepared for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) and to list on the Australian Securities Exchange, its directors and senior management team set about investigating how WDS could best establish the corporate governance infrastructure that would be necessary for the company to ensure it could satisfy its new found obligations, as a listed entity, under the Corporations Act 2000, the ASX listing rules and the ASX Corporate Governance Guidelines.
Seeking advice from a range of legal advisors and external consultants it quickly became apparent that the task of establishing the necessary infrastructure would be both extremely time consuming and expensive.
In addition to its already complex compliance requirements in areas such as industrial relations and workplace safety (WDS operates in mining sites across multiple state jurisdictions), compliance with the ASX Corporate Governance Guidelines required WDS to implement:
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- an Enterprise Risk Management Program;
- an Internal Control (Compliance) Program; and
- a range of corporate governance policies covering areas such as Periodic and Continuous Disclosure, Securities Trading, Conflicts of Interest and Media & External Communications.
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WDS recognised that it wasn’t just a matter of putting together a few paper based policies and attempting to monitor compliance with spreadsheets and that in order to ensure that it developed an infrastructure that would add value to its business and its shareholders, it needed to take a whole of business approach. WDS required that the system it chose to implement it would present a sustainable solution which had the flexibility to meet WDS’s business needs as the company grew.
After investigating alternatives, WDS chose to implement CompliSpace as it was the only service offering on the market that provided a turn-key solution to meet the immediate and ongoing corporate governance needs of WDS and its subsidiary companies- Walter Mining Pty Ltd and Diversified Construction Corporation Pty Ltd. As CompliSpace is delivered online, WDS now has the ability to communicate effectively across its geographically dispersed operations.
Michael Jones, General Manager - Commercial and Risk Management, commented:
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"CompliSpace delivered the turn-key solution we were looking for, on a tight pre-listing timetable and, at a fraction of the cost of quotes we had received from traditional professional service providers. One of the big advantages that we see is that CompliSpace is backed by a team of legal and industry experts who monitor changes in key legal and policy areas and provide us with updates as changes occur. The fact that we were able to use CompliSpace to demonstrate the strength of our corporate governance program to potential institutional investors in the lead up to the listing is testament to the strength of the service. I strongly recommend it.”
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WDS successfully listed on the ASX on 7 December 2006.
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