Thursday, 8 December 2022 at 16:00-17:30 in room SOC-356 / Zoom

A presentation by Hla Thel Phyu (PhD candidate at the Department of Business Administration of TalTech).

This study examines the voluntary financial disclosure of special purpose vehicles (SPVs) involved in the UK's first design, build, finance, maintain, operate (DBFMO) road projects and attempts to understand some of the driving factors behind such disclosures by examining them through the lens of political economy theory. A content analysis of annual reports from 2004–2019 was conducted using Shaoul et al.'s (2010a) financial disclosure checklist to determine whether the financial disclosures provided by ten samples SPVs have improved and whether the information reported by those operating in environmentally controversial projects is more detailed than those not involved in environmentally controversial projects. The findings show that none of the ten SPVs provided full financial disclosure for all the desirable items deemed necessary for greater transparency by Shaoul et al. A significant majority of the SPVs (eight out of ten) increased their disclosure of related parties' transactions and values of assets and liabilities disclosures either in detail (full disclosure) or on a limited basis (partial disclosure). However, the disclosure of cash flow statements by the SPVs has declined over the years, with all of them failing to disclose performance deductions deemed necessary for controlling contractors’ services. Contrary to political economy theory, three SPVs involved in environmentally controversial projects either partially or fully reported fewer desirable disclosures than the non-involved seven SPVs. This comparative study contributes to the literature on transparency in information disclosure of SPVs by identifying information deficiencies and the lack of harmonised accounting practices, which is important for the accountability process in PFI. The study also describes the external factors that can facilitate transparency in the private sector reporting under PFI in the absence of government and market controls.

Hla Thel Phyu is a PhD candidate at the School of Business and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology. She is supervised by Professor Istemi Demirag and Associate Professor Natalie Gurvitš-Suits, and the topic of her project is “Transparency and Financial accountability in Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs)”. She received a Bachelor of Commerce (Specializing in Accounting and Finance) from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and a Master's degree (Specializing in Accounting and Finance) from Umeå University (Sweden). She worked as an accountant in Singapore for over six years. In her research, she focuses on transparency, financial accountability and governance in SPVs, which are micro-level of Private Finance Initiatives (PFI), also known as Public-Private Partnership (PPP).