3.2.7External Auditor
The external auditor of SBM Offshore is appointed by the General Meeting of Shareholders on the proposal of the Supervisory Board upon the selection process and nomination of the Audit and Finance Committee and the advice of the Management Board. PricewaterhouseCoopers Accountants N.V. (’PricewaterhouseCoopers’) was first appointed during the 2014 AGM and re-appointed during the 2018 AGM for a period of three years and ending with the audit of the financial year 2020. Pursuant to the Dutch Auditors Profession Act (Wet op het accountantsberoep), the audit firm of a so-called public interest entity (such as a listed company) is required to be replaced if the audit firm has performed the statutory audits of the company for a period of ten consecutive years. This would allow PricewaterhouseCoopers to be re-appointed at the 2021 AGM for the audits of the financial years 2021-2023. Such re-appointment will be proposed at the 2021 AGM. Based on auditor independence requirements, the lead auditor in charge of the SBM Offshore account is changed every five years.
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 results and is given the opportunity to comment and respond to this information.
Pursuant to the Auditor’s 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 2020, a small number of limited-scope non-audit services were provided by foreign member firms of the PricewaterhouseCoopers global network, taking into account the external auditor’s independence rules and SBM Offshore’s policy in this regard.