Teresa Cleary, General Counsel and Company Secretary at Elixinol Global Limited, is being recognized by Diligent’s Modern Governance 100 program. The Modern Governance 100 is a community of general counsels, corporate secretaries and other governance professionals who have demonstrated resilience, dedication and empathy in the face of a complex and ever-changing world.
Teresa Cleary plays a crucial role in the modern governance practices for ASX listed Elixinol Global Limited. The company’s governance goals center around supporting growth and success across multiple jurisdictions, which contributed greatly to the search for business tools to navigate this challenging period.
Cleary was hired to be a key advisor to the Board on corporate governance issues and be responsible for establishing best practices across current processes and systems. Cleary’s first task was to implement Diligent and tap into the insights and market intelligence its directors needed. “Modern governance and Diligent go hand in hand,” said Cleary. “I have used Diligent in two previous roles, and when there is better collaboration, there is better discussion around emerging governance issues.”
For Elixinol Global, modern governance is intertwined with technology transformation initiatives to help the business develop. As Cleary framed it, “Modern governance technology from Diligent delivers better collaboration for the Board. It ensures we can hold effective meetings and focus on the critical issues at hand rather than shuffling papers.”
A core governance issue for Cleary and the Elixinol Global Board is ESG, particularly as it is a fairly recent entrant on the ASX: “ESG is part of what we do as we specialize in a sustainable product – but as a listed entity, we need to ensure we factor shareholders’ interests into everything we do,” Cleary explained. “As we grow, we need to stay across ESG at both a product and a company level, and being able to access organisational insights in Diligent will support this.”
How Cleary Uses Diligent
- Cross-jurisdiction collaboration, spanning multiple locations and varying regulations
- To ensure confidential and commercially sensitive documents remain safeguarded within a secure network
- Automated collaboration controls to increase efficiency, improve accuracy and deliver a reliable workflow for decision making
Effective modern governance, and supporting growing ESG initiatives, is an ongoing journey for Elixinol and Cleary. “We have cross-jurisdictional challenges, and the Board is extremely positive about the benefits of Diligent,” Cleary noted. “With the implementation of Diligent, the Board now operates at its optimal level. It has transformed how we run board meetings, and with a seamless, natural process we are now focusing on the issues we should be focusing on – not on what page we should be referring to.”
About the Nominee
For two decades Teresa Cleary’s career has embraced a mix of roles including counsel, non-executive director and company secretary. She is a Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia and in 2020, was recognized by Diligent’s Modern Governance 100 program.
About Elixinol Global
Elixinol Global Limited (ASX: EXL; OTCQB: ELLXF) is a global leader in the hemp- industry, innovating, marketing and selling hemp-derived nutraceutical and food products. Its operations are focused on the Americas, Europe & UK, Australia and Rest of World (South Africa and Japan).
