This thesis is a study of multiple access schemes for satellite land mobile systems that provide a domestic or regional service to a large number of small terminals. Three orbit options are studied, namely the geostationary, elliptical (Molniya) and inclined circular orbits. These are investigated for various mobile applications and the choice of the Molniya orbit is justified for a U. K. system. Frequency, Time and Code Division Multiple Access (FDMA, TDMA and CDMA) are studied and their relative merits in the mobile environment are highlighted. A hybrid TDMA/FDMA structure is suggested for a large system. Reservation ALOHA schemes are appraised in a TDMA environment and an adaptive reservation multiple access protocol is proposed and analysed for a wide range of mobile communication traffic profiles. The system can cope with short and long data messages as well as voice calls. Various protocol options are presented and a target system having 100,000 users is considered. Analyses are presented for the steady state of protocols employing pure and slotted ALOHA and for the stabilty of the slotted variant, while simulation techniques were employed to validate the steady state analysis of the slotted ALOHA protocol and to analyse the stability problem of the pure ALOHA version. An innovative technique is put forward to integrate the reservation and the acquisition processes. It employs the geographical spread of the users to form part of the random delay in P-ALOHA. Finally an economic feasibility study is performed for the spacesegment. For costs of capital (r) less than 23 % the discounted payback period is less than the project's lifetime (10 years). At r- 8% the payback period is about 5.6 years, while the internal-rate-of-return is 22.2 %. The net present value at the end of the projects lifetime is £M 70 at r-8%.

<p>This thesis will examine the effects of divorce on the benefit payable to a member of a retirement fund, where divorce has occurred before the member has reached retirement age. In&nbsp / particular, parametric (that is, piecemeal) amendments to the relevant legislation will be analysed in order to outline the development of the legislation relating to divorce and the consequent distribution of&nbsp / assets (including retirement savings). The previous and current legal position in South Africa relating to divorce and retirement savings will be set out and critically analysed to determine whether the current position can be regarded as an improvement upon the previous legal position, or whether other and/or new problems in this area have been created. Parametric amendments to&nbsp / relevant legislation have thus far been the subject of many cases in our courts and adjudicative tribunals. A systemic overhaul of a particular area of law is a useful tool in providing legal certainty&nbsp / and clarifying the laws applicable to that area. This thesis will therefore argue in favour of a systemic overhaul of the legislation applicable to the allocation of retirement benefits at divorce, as opposed to the ineffectual parametric (i.e. piecemeal) amendments that have been implemented thus far. An essential aspect of this study is a comparative study of South African legal principles&nbsp / relating to retirement benefits and divorce with the legal principles of this subject in the United Kingdom (UK).</p>

<p>This thesis will examine the effects of divorce on the benefit payable to a member of a retirement fund, where divorce has occurred before the member has reached retirement age. In&nbsp / particular, parametric (that is, piecemeal) amendments to the relevant legislation will be analysed in order to outline the development of the legislation relating to divorce and the consequent distribution of&nbsp / assets (including retirement savings). The previous and current legal position in South Africa relating to divorce and retirement savings will be set out and critically analysed to determine whether the current position can be regarded as an improvement upon the previous legal position, or whether other and/or new problems in this area have been created. Parametric amendments to&nbsp / relevant legislation have thus far been the subject of many cases in our courts and adjudicative tribunals. A systemic overhaul of a particular area of law is a useful tool in providing legal certainty&nbsp / and clarifying the laws applicable to that area. This thesis will therefore argue in favour of a systemic overhaul of the legislation applicable to the allocation of retirement benefits at divorce, as opposed to the ineffectual parametric (i.e. piecemeal) amendments that have been implemented thus far. An essential aspect of this study is a comparative study of South African legal principles&nbsp / relating to retirement benefits and divorce with the legal principles of this subject in the United Kingdom (UK).</p>

Magister Legum - LLM / This thesis will examine the effects of divorce on the benefit payable to a member of a retirement fund, where divorce has occurred before the member has reached retirement age. In particular, parametric (that is, piecemeal) amendments to the relevant legislation will be analysed in order to outline the development of the legislation relating to divorce and the consequent distribution of assets (including retirement savings). The previous and current legal position in South Africa relating to divorce and retirement savings will be set out and critically analysed to determine whether the current position can be regarded as an improvement upon the previous legal position, or whether other and/or new problems in this area have been created. Parametric amendments to relevant legislation have thus far been the subject of many cases in our courts and adjudicative tribunals. A systemic overhaul of a particular area of law is a useful tool in providing legal certainty and clarifying the laws applicable to that area. This thesis will therefore argue in favour of a systemic overhaul of the legislation applicable to the allocation of retirement benefits at divorce, as opposed to the ineffectual parametric (i.e. piecemeal) amendments that have been implemented thus far. An essential aspect of this study is a comparative study of South African legal principles relating to retirement benefits and divorce with the legal principles of this subject in the United Kingdom (UK). / South Africa

Please read the summary in the front pages of the file named 00dissertation / Dissertation (LLM (Procedural Law))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Procedural Law / unrestricted

This thesis is a study of multiple access schemes for satellite land mobile systems that provide a domestic or regional service to a large number of small terminals. Three orbit options are studied, namely the geostationary, elliptical (Molniya) and inclined circular orbits. These are investigated for various mobile applications and the choice of the Molniya orbit is justified for a U. K. system. Frequency, Time and Code Division Multiple Access (FDMA, TDMA and CDMA) are studied and their relative merits in the mobile environment are highlighted. A hybrid TDMA/FDMA structure is suggested for a large system. Reservation ALOHA schemes are appraised in a TDMA environment and an adaptive reservation multiple access protocol is proposed and analysed for a wide range of mobile communication traffic profiles. The system can cope with short and long data messages as well as voice calls. Various protocol options are presented and a target system having 100,000 users is considered. Analyses are presented for the steady state of protocols employing pure and slotted ALOHA and for the stabilty of the slotted variant, while simulation techniques were employed to validate the steady state analysis of the slotted ALOHA protocol and to analyse the stability problem of the pure ALOHA version. An innovative technique is put forward to integrate the reservation and the acquisition processes. It employs the geographical spread of the users to form part of the random delay in P-ALOHA. Finally an economic feasibility study is performed for the spacesegment. For costs of capital (r) less than 23 % the discounted payback period is less than the project's lifetime (10 years). At r- 8% the payback period is about 5.6 years, while the internal-rate-of-return is 22.2 %. The net present value at the end of the projects lifetime is £M 70 at r-8%.

Structural changes in the knowledge economy have greatly affected the way business is conducted and the processes firms create value. The financial reporting system is inadequate as a result of such changes, and disclosure of intellectual capital (IC) information has gained importance for communicating with capital markets. Empirical research documents corporate governance (CG) factors influencing IC disclosure practices, as well as demonstrates the value-relevance and predictive power of IC information. The disclosure of IC information by listed firms is a topic that has attracted considerable attention from contemporary researchers, but scant empirical evidence exists. Much of the researchers has examined CG as a key determinant of IC (and nonfinancial) disclosure; in contrast, few provides evidence for explaining their controversial findings of board independence on disclosure. In addition, a lack of studies confirms the literature about the use of IC information by capital market participants. Therefore, this thesis aims to examine disclosure of IC information in relation to outside directors, auditors, and sell-side analysts respectively. The specific objectives of this thesis are to examine whether outside directors’ expertise is a determinant of IC disclosure; and the extent to which the disclosure of IC information impacts on audit effort and analysts’ forecasts. In order to address these research objectives, a content analysis of IC disclosure (a self-constructed index of 64 coded items) in strategic reports released by FTST 350 companies is used. The content analysis captures and measures IC disclosure by category (i.e., human, structural & relational capital), notion (i.e., static vs. dynamic), and connection (i.e., across categories vs. with strategies). Using multivariate regression models that were primarily developed upon information asymmetry arguments and agency theory, the specific objectives of this thesis are addressed in three empirical chapters. The findings in Chapter 3 showed that proportion of outside directors (NEDs) with cross-directorship, nonaccounting and academia expertise has a positive association with IC disclosures, whereas board independence itself has no effect on the disclosures. The findings indicates that the monitoring role of NEDs alone is inadequate in promoting IC disclosure. Rather, it supports the importance of the dual role (i.e., monitor and advisory) of a supervisory board. The results also respond to the UK CG Code in their recommendation that the combination of skills, experience and knowledge guarantees a sound information environment to the market. Nonetheless, findings raised a further concern about the quantity of IC disclosures when companies have more NEDs with accounting expertise. On whether and how disclosure of IC information impacts on audit effort, Chapter 4 found that firms with high levels of IC disclosure in the previous year pay more audit fees (proxied for audit effort) in the current year regardless of their earnings quality conditions. It was also found that firms greatly disclosing dynamic IC information are charged more than those of focusing on static IC disclosure. In addition, findings in Chapter 5 revealed that there is a negative relation between IC disclosure and analyst forecast errors, indicating that UK sell-side analysts appreciate the disclosure of IC information and thus confirming that IC information has predictive ability of explaining a firm’s future value. It was further identified that disclosed IC information absorbs the negative effect of concentrated executive ownership and opaque financial environment. Overall, the results of this thesis suggest that IC reporting process could be improved by having sufficient outside directors with certain types of expertise on the board. In doing so, improved IC disclosure helps to reduce information asymmetry (proxied by analyst forecast accuracy) between firms and outside investors, albeit firms bear a significant increase in audit fees. This study calls for guidelines for IC disclosure in the UK and the support of assurance services to enhance credibility of firm-provided IC information in a bid to promote the communication of IC information with the capital market.

No / This paper utilises computerised textual analysis to explore the extent to which both firm and country characteristics influence mandatory and voluntary risk reporting (MRR and VRR) variations both within and between non-financial firms across Germany, the UK and the US, over the period from 2005 to 2010. We find significant variations in MRR and VRR between firms across the three countries. Further, we find, on average, that German firms tend to disclose significantly higher (lower) levels of risk information mandatorily than UK (US) firms. German firms, on average, tend to reveal considerably higher (lower) levels of VRR than US (UK) firms. Our results document that MRR and VRR variations are significantly influenced by systematic risk, the legal system and cultural values. We also find that country and firm characteristics have higher explanatory power over the observed variations in MRR than over those in VRR.

No / Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Question/Issue: This paper examines the influence of corporate governance on risk disclosure practices in the UK and Italy and also studies the impact of those practices on market liquidity. Research Findings/Insights: We find that governance factors principally influence the decisions of UK (Italian) firms over whether to exhibit risk information voluntarily (mandatorily) in their annual report narratives. When we distinguish between firms with strong and weak governance (in terms of board efficiency) in each country, we find that the factors that affect mandatory and voluntary risk disclosure appear to be driven more by strongly governed firms in both countries. Furthermore, strongly governed firms in the UK tend to provide more meaningful risk information to their investors than weakly governed firms. In Italy, however, we find that strongly rather than weakly governed firms exhibiting risk information voluntarily rather than mandatorily improves market liquidity significantly. Theoretical/Academic Implications: This paper emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between mandatory and voluntary risk disclosure when studying the impact of corporate governance. Our findings differ across strongly and weakly governed firms, in terms of both the factors that influence risk disclosure practices and the exact informativeness of those practices. Practitioner/Policy Implications: The results support the current regulatory trend in risk reporting within the UK that emphasizes the importance of directors and encourages rather than mandates risk disclosure. However, the results generally signal a need for further improvements in the Italian context. Our evidence also supports the value of the confidence in the UK governance system, compared to that in Italy, which motivates British firms to provide highly informative risk information more often than Italian firms.

With the implementation of more and more stringent measures to prevent money laundering, criminals are resorting to the expertise of lawyers for assistance in the formulation of increasingly complex money laundering schemes. This expertise is provided both wittingly and unwittingly. The purpose of this research was to consider whether the South African anti-money laundering legislation places suspicious transaction reporting obligations, which are in line with and meet international directives, conventions and best practice frameworks, on attorneys. The study entails a consideration of the suspicious transaction reporting obligations of lawyers introduced by the Financial Action Task Force, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Africa and provides an understanding of the concept of money laundering, the money laundering process and the areas in which lawyers are vulnerable to money laundering. The research found that the suspicious transaction reporting responsibilities of attorneys in terms of South African anti-money laundering legislation are not in line with international frameworks and best practice. / Dissertation (MPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Auditing / MPhil / Unrestricted