The EU Commission adopted a proposal for a new ‘Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive’ (CSRD) on 21 April 2021, significantly extending the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ scope characterising the previous (and currently in force) ‘Non Financial Reporting Directive’ (NFRD), which mandates large undertakings to disclose ESG (‘Environmental, Social and Governance’) data.

At the above seminar in which William Boyd (University of California, Los Angeles) and Alberto de Franceschi (University of Ferrara), Chairs of the SIG, joined as discussants, Alberto Mattia Serafin (University of Cassino) reflected on the attitude of such disclosure regimes to ‘hypostatize’ the general objectives pursued by the EU (most of all, ‘sustainable development’) and critically examined the most challenging techniques used to ‘customise’ the transparency obligation (comply or explain and ‘double’ materiality), assessing their compatibility with the proportionality principle.

This was followed by a lively Q&A discussion. The slides from the lecture are available here.