This article reviews if the introduction of new laws to encourage and protect whistleblowers is sufficient to improve corporate governance in Malaysian public-listed companies. It provides suggestions to formulate internal whistle-blowing policies for companies. It concludes that due to the culture of the people and the taxonomy of Malaysian public-listed companies and companies in other countries in the Asia–Pacific region, having laws to encourage and protect whistleblowers to get rid of corporate wrong-doings is not necessarily the only solution. The article (...) defines whistle blowing and the benefits of encouraging whistleblowers. It proceeds to highlight the issues of concern on whistle blowing. It also deliberates particular issues of whistleblowing in Malaysia by discussing the taxonomy of Malaysian public-listed companies, the strength of the regulators in enforcement, the Malaysian culture, and the Malaysian corporate scandals. The article elaborates on the whistle-blowing laws in Malaysia and concludes by providing alternate ways to encourage whistle blowing in Malaysian companies having in mind the taxonomy of Malaysian companies, enforcement by regulators and the Malaysian culture. (shrink)

Epistemic protocols are communication protocols aiming at transfer of knowledge in a controlled way. Typically, the preconditions or goals for protocol actions depend on the knowledge of agents, often in nested form. Informal epistemic protocol descriptions for muddy children, coordinated attack, dining cryptographers, Russian cards, secret key exchange are well known. The contribution of this paper is a formal study of a natural requirement on epistemic protocols, that the contents of the protocol can be assumed to be common knowledge. By (...) formalizing this requirement we can prove that there can be no unbiased deterministic protocol for the Russian cards problem. For purposes of our formal analysis we introduce an epistemic protocol language, and we show that its model checking problem is decidable. (shrink)