You are cordially invited to the seminar organised by Bilkent University Faculty of Law.
“Sustainability-Related Corporate Disclosure Obligations: A Trend or A Dead End?”
Dr. Abdurrahman Kayıklık
Koç University Law School
2 June 2025, Monday – 13:30
Art Gallery, Main Campus Library
“Sustainability-Related Corporate Disclosure Obligations: A Trend or A Dead End?” Transparency is regarded as one of the main pillars of corporate governance, with large public corporations traditionally being subject to a comprehensive array of disclosure requirements. The conventional criterion for determining when a certain piece of information is to be disclosed is financial materiality. Accordingly, firms are required to disclose information if it is likely to affect investment decisions by existing and potential shareholders. The rise of non-financial reporting requirements has been a paradigm-shifting development in this context. Disclosure of sustainability-related information, especially with reference to climate change, has carved out a place for itself within the financial materiality-based framework while also giving rise to what is termed the double materiality approach. Just a few years ago, sustainability-related corporate disclosure requirements were rapidly expanding across multiple jurisdictions in terms of both subjective and objective scope, and it looked like they would soon become a core and essential part of corporate transparency regimes. It now appears, however, that this momentum has been reversed. The prospect for further expansion rather looks bleak, and steps backwards are becoming more and more prevalent. This seminar will discuss how the initial trend emerged, why it suddenly stalled, and how it might evolve.
Dr. Abdurrahman Kayıklık graduated first in his class from Koç University Law School in 2018, also completing a double major in economics at the same university. Dr. Kayıklık obtained his Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019, focusing on corporate law and corporate governance. He received his doctorate from Koç University in 2024, and his dissertation titled “Representation of the Joint Stock Company” was published as a book the same year. He was a visiting doctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin as a TÜBİTAK scholar in the second half of 2023. He has served as a research assistant in the Department of Commercial Law at Koç University Law School since 2019 and has been lecturing at the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences since 2024. Dr. Kayıklık has published various articles, book chapters, and blog posts, and has presented papers at national and international events in the fields of corporate law, commercial enterprise law, arbitration, and sustainability. His current research projects focus on risk management in corporate governance, public disclosure requirements in capital markets, and the concept of the “prudent merchant”.