FRIntroducing GoodCorporation’s anti-corruption debate, Lord Gold began by affirming that the primary role of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is to investigate and prosecute. While the Conservative Party manifesto proposes absorbing the SFO into the National Crime Agency, there is unlikely to be any deviation from that primary purpose. Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are also…
Category Archives: Business Ethics Debates
Richard Brearley, head of compliance (EMEA) at Macquarie led our debate on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into force in May 2018. The introduction began with an interrogation of the likely impact of the GDPR; is it a significant game changer or does it represent incremental change under a tougher enforcement regime?…
Sir Roger Singleton, former chief executive of Barnardo’s and a leading adviser to the Government on safeguarding children introduced the topic of the first GoodCorporation Business Ethics Debate of 2017. He began with a summary of the five key factors that are central to a better understanding of safeguarding. Despite the focus on Stranger Danger,…
Dan Silver, Global Functions and Compliance Officer for Shell, but speaking in a personal capacity, began our final Business Ethics Debate of 2016 by posing the question, are ethics and compliance a force for good or simply an insurance policy? The insurance policy approach involves a lot of investment in ethics and compliance programmes to…
With its fifth position in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, a measure of the perceived levels of corruption in a country’s public sector, the Netherlands is considered to be one of the least corrupt countries in the world. In recent years however, Dutch businesses such as Vimpelcom, Ballast Nedam, KPMG Netherlands and SBM Offshore, have…
Businesses have long focussed on financial analysis as a means of measuring success and demonstrating value to shareholders. While this undoubtedly provides useful information it is not necessarily the best or only indicator of long-term corporate sustainability. Harder to measure, but fundamental to any organisation’s longevity is the manner in which a company goes about…
The digitisation of our personal information has made that data vulnerable: as HMRC found out in 2007 it is relatively easy to lose the records of 25 million individuals when they are contained on a couple of floppy discs – 25 million paper records are far harder to mislay. As users and processors of this…
Robert Barrington, executive director of Transparency International opened our debate on the international anti-corruption landscape with a summary of the global picture. The Changing Landscape o The Tightening net of anti-corruption legislation While much has been done to strengthen anti-corruption legislation around the globe, enforcement remains a problem. Of the 41 signatories to the OECD…
GoodCorporation’s first Business Ethics Debate of 2016 began with the suggestion that sport’s governing bodies are doomed to fail in terms of ethical governance. Shaila-Ann Rao, former CEO of Sportfive International introduced the debate with an outline of the reasons why governance is failing in sport. 1. Sporting ideals of team spirit, fair play and…
The debate began by asking what we mean by a ‘good’ company? In English, ‘good’ has both a moral and a practical meaning; we talk about doing the right thing and how well something works. While these are two distinct concepts, there is a philosophical argument that suggests that the two are inextricably linked. Applied…
