The world renowned Cranfield School of Management in the UK will present a scholarship to any member of the three leading IFAC accountancy bodies in Sri Lanka, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Institute of Chartered Accountants Sri Lanka (ICASL) or the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Sri Lanka Branch (CIMA). Full Time MBA Programme Director Sean Rickard who informed Sri Lanka of the scholarship said, “We hope the scholarship attracts candidates who will benefit from this initiative and that, with the help of the accounting bodies in Sri Lanka, it will raise Cranfield’s profile. We are extremely grateful for the support of the institutes in this. We will be reviewing the success of the programme after two years.”

ACCA Sri Lanka’s Immediate Past President, Dilshan Rodrigo, himself an alumni of the Cranfield School of Management extends his best wishes to all candidates and says, “I hope most sincerely that this initiative will signal the birth of a new generation of professional skilled managers who will add value to the corporate boardrooms of Sri Lanka.” Stating that this is truly a world class MBA ranked consistently as one of the top MBAs in Europe, he adds, “This one year full time programme is ideally suited for members in middle and senior management positions with ambitious career goals.” Rodrigo, who has continued to maintain ties with Cranfield, further reinforced the relationship once he became President of ACCA Sri Lanka, sourcing resource speakers for the ACCA National Conferences in the last two years. “Two people who played significant roles in mooting this scholarship from the Cranfield end are the former Director of the MBA Programme Professor Leo Murray who was the Keynote Speaker at our conference in 2006 and has a soft spot for Sri Lankans and Sri Sriskanthan, a Sri Lankan faculty member on the MBA programme.”

Cranfield has produced a distinguished honour roll of MBA alumni from Sri Lanka over the last two decades including Managing Director of Hatton National Bank Rajendra Theagarajah, Senior Vice President of WNS Arul Sivagananathan and Group Financial Controller of Stretchline Hasantha de Silva. Members of ICASL, ACCA and CIMA must apply directly to Cranfield School of Management, for which instructions are available on the Cranfield website ww.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/mba/, marking the application ‘Sri Lanka Scholarship’.

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The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC) is all set to enter a collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (Cima), to jointly establish a National Centre for Management Accounting.

The intention is to shape international best practices in the area of management accounting, which, along with enterprise governance, is a core strength of Cima, a leading membership body that offers an internationally recognised professional qualification in management accountancy.

For Cima, which has over 1,55,000 students and a presence in some 158 countries, this proposal to IIM-C is a means of building up its presence in India. Later, it also plans to set up a few regional hubs.

IIM-C already has a Centre for Corporate Governance, which will work with the new IIMC-Cima National Centre for Management Accounting to support Cima’s initiatives in the area of enterprise governance.

“The Cima authorities felt that there was a synergy between the two and discussions between us have almost reached the final stages,” Asish K Bhattacharyya, professor of finance and control and co-ordinator, Centre for Corporate Governance, told ET.

“The Centre will conduct research, prepare and publish papers in international journals, conduct field studies and case studies, hold international conferences and train corporate executives,” he added.

During ‘07-08, the Centre will launch a one-year certificate programme on Financial Statement Analysis and Business Valuation. This apart, the Centre will also offer short duration executive education programmes in the area of management accounting.

For senior managers, there will be the following training programmes: strategic cost management and financial statement analysis and business valuation.