Many other markets have such players: think the Council of Institutional Investors (U.S.): the NAPF and ABI (U.K.); ACSI (Australia); AFG (France); or PFA (Japan), for instance. They don’t always succeed in pressing fund interests; but they help.

“We need a coordinating body for shareholders, in India and in most markets,” contends Peter Taylor of Aberdeen Asset Management, which was Satyam’s largest institutional shareowner until it sold out in disgust last week.

Lax oversight by Indian regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Board of India enabled the Satyam fraud, but Satyam is also listed on the NYSE Euronext. It and other U.S. and U.K. exchanges routinelyl waive strictest rules on financial audit committee expertise in order to attract business from ADR issuers like Satyam. While it’s not yet clear that better corporate governance couuld have prevented the years-long deception, it would have made it more difficult to pull off.

There were red flags, however. GovernanceMetrics International, for one, warned in September that Satyam had no financial experts on its audit committee and that its board did not meet independently of management, providing no oversight of the family-run company.

The project will run tandem to a commission the CII agreed to form with the CFA Institute. Expect leading CII funds to advocate for at least three market-wide changes: easier shareowner rights to nominate corporate directors (”access”), say-on-pay votes to align CEO pay with performance, and a swift end to broker voting, which can skew ballot outcomes, according to GPW.

The voice of the shareowner hasn’t been heard much in the scrum over how to rescue U.S. financial markets. That’s partly because investors as a group hve never developed heavyweight political clout. It’s also because the CII,, the chief shareowner group in the U.S., is a jigsaw of corporate, labor, and civil pension funds that don’t always agree with each other. But the crisis has galvanized the CII into action.

At its semi-annual meeting in Chicago, some council members also proposed issuing an urgent collective letter on the financial bailout to ensure that the shareowner perspective forms part of political and regulatory agendas in Washington.

Large funds such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) are planning to coordinate its own separate efforts.

The CII also took its first major steps to globalize. Its international committee decided in Chicago to build website profiles of issues, groups, and contacts in major markets as a resource for CII meetings. And it is considering a formal liaison with the International Corporate Governance Network, which the CII helped to create 14 years ago.

Eventually, the CII may engage individual companies in other markets on governance failures, as it does at home. The international panel is headed by Florida State Board of Administration Mike McCauley and Sara Lee general counsel Margaret “Peggy” Foran.