International Financial Report

This study guide is aimed at exploring the informational value of the annual report under the International Financial Reporting Standards’ (IFRS) provisions.

The annual report is a publication that fulfils the regulatory requirements of reporting the financial performance and situation of a reporting entity and, at the same time, is also used for wider corporate communication purposes.

A reporting entity (which we will call “entity” from here onwards) is either a company or a group of companies, which are all controlled by the same decision maker, i.e. normally the same board of directors. This occurs when the board of directors of a company controls directly or indirectly a number of other companies, by holding directly or indirectly the absolute or relative majority of the voting rights of other companies. Figure 1 illustrates an example where Alfa Ltd is a company that controls a group of companies made of: Beta Ltd (directly controlled), Gamma Ltd (indirectly controlled), Delta Ltd (directly controlled by absolute majority) and Epsilon Ltd (indirectly controlled by relative majority), whilst Theta Ltd is not part of the group, the ‘Alfa group’ either exercises significant influence over Theta Ltd or does not, making Theta Ltd respectively either an associate company or simply an investment of the ‘Alfa group’. This simple example is based on the assumptions that the remaining part of the capital1 of Epsilon Ltd is spread among many shareholders, none of which controls more than 15% and that this does not apply to the remaining capital of Theta Ltd. All the companies that are part of the group are ‘subsidiaries’ of Alfa Ltd.