Reporting Responsibility

Financial statements and accounting records
The Directors are responsible for preparing the Annual Report and Accounts including the Directors’ Remuneration report and the financial statements in accordance with applicable law and regulations.

Company law requires the Directors to prepare financial statements for each financial year. The Directors are required by the International Accounting Standards Regulation (the ‘IAS Regulation’) to prepare the Group financial statements under International Financial Reporting Standards as adopted by the European Union (‘IFRS’) and have also elected to prepare the Parent Company financial statements in accordance with IFRS. The financial statements are also required by law to be properly prepared in accordance with the Companies Act 2006 and Article 4 of the IAS Regulation. Under the Disclosure and Transparency Rules, the Directors must not approve the accounts unless they are satisfied that they give a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the Company and of the profit or loss of the Company for that period.

International Accounting Standard 1 requires that financial statements present fairly for each financial year the Company’s financial position, financial performance and cash flows. This requires the faithful representation of the effects of transactions, other events and conditions in accordance with the definitions and recognition criteria for assets, liabilities, income and expenses set out in the International Accounting Standards Board’s ‘Framework for the preparation and presentation of financial statements’. In virtually all circumstances, a fair presentation will be achieved by compliance with all applicable IFRS. Directors are also required to:

• properly select and apply accounting policies;
• present information, including accounting policies, in a manner that provides relevant, reliable, comparable and understandable information;
• provide additional disclosures when compliance with the specific requirements in IFRS are insufficient to enable users to understand the impact of particular transactions, other events and conditions on the entity’s financial position and financial performance; and
• make an assessment of the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

The Directors are responsible for keeping adequate accounting records that are sufficient to show and explain the Company’s transactions and disclose with reasonable accuracy at any time the financial position of the Company and enable them to ensure that the financial statements comply with the Companies Act 2006. They are also responsible for safeguarding the assets of the Company and hence for taking reasonable steps for the prevention and detection of fraud and other irregularities.

The Directors are responsible for the maintenance and integrity of the corporate and financial information included on the Company’s website. Legislation in the United Kingdom governing the preparation and dissemination of financial statements may differ from legislation in other jurisdictions.