3.5.6Auditors

The external auditor of SBM Offshore is appointed by the General Meeting on the proposal of the Supervisory Board. During the Annual General Meeting of 2014, PricewaterhouseCoopers Accountants N.V. (’PricewaterhouseCoopers’) was appointed for a term of four years (for the audit of the financial years 2014-2017). The Audit and Finance Committee, together with the Supervisory Board and the Management Board, made an independent evaluation of the performance of PricewaterhouseCoopers. In view of the positive outcome of the evaluation, the Supervisory Board proposed to re-appoint PricewaterhouseCoopers as external auditor. During the Annual General Meeting of 2018, PricewaterhouseCoopers was re-appointed as external auditor for a period of three years (for the audit of the financial years 2018-2020).

The current lead auditor is Michael de Ridder of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The external auditor attends all meetings of the Audit and Finance Committee, as well as the meeting of the Supervisory Board at which the financial statements are approved. The external auditor receives the financial information and underlying reports of the quarterly figures and is given the opportunity to comment and respond to this information.

Based on auditor independence requirements, the lead auditor in charge of the SBM Offshore account is changed every five years. Pursuant to the Dutch Audit Profession Act (Wet op het accountantsberoep), the audit firm of a so-called public interest entity (such as a listed company) will have to be replaced if the audit firm performed the statutory audits of the Company for a period of ten consecutive years, at the latest in 2024.

Pursuant to the Audit Profession Act, the auditors are prohibited from providing the Company with services in the Netherlands other than ‘audit services aimed to provide reliability concerning the information supplied by the audited client for the benefit of external users of this information and also for the benefit of the Supervisory Board, as referred to in the reports mentioned’. During 2018, a small number of limited-scope non-audit services were provided by foreign member firms of the PricewaterhouseCoopers global network, taking into account the global independence rules and SBM Offshore’s own policy in this regard.