With the judicial system worldwide investigating finance companies for misleading disclosures, deception has become a topical issue. However, deception is an area that has historically not been favoured in academia. The paper aims to determine whether disclosure practices of failed companies show more characteristics of deception than those of viable companies. The research will involve a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including the use of content analysis and the software DICTION. An index of deception is constructed. The higher the deception score, the more deceptive the authors are deemed to be. This study tests this argument with respect to the prospectuses of a sample of failed and non-failed New Zealand finance companies.

Unlimited demands of development and non-stopped destruction of surrounding environments cause many environmental problems. In this paper, Climate Change as one important issue has been studied against an Asian background. For the purpose of showing a clear trend of communicated corporate awareness in global Climate Change issues, in this report, seventy Asian companies have been studied. The results show a relatively low-level growth curve of communicated corporate Climate Change awareness by dissecting companies’ CEO Letters during years 2000 to 2009, followed by a comparison study with European results and five possible explanations in the discussion part. As the conclusion of this paper, an increased interest among Asian governments and companies during year 2000-2009 has been observed. However, there is still lack of knowledge on a general level compared with the European results. According to the five possible explanations, several possible future studies have also been recommended in the paper: 1) Comparison study under the same scope within Asia or other continents; 2) Case-study on specific interested companies; 3) On-going study on the future curve trend with the same target group.