Financial Times: OBSERVER: Road to Damascus
May 17, 2004
Corporate social responsibility conferences often involve the virtuous preaching smugly to the converted. So hats off to an international conference held in New York last week to address "promises and challenges" in developing voluntary codes of conduct for multinational companies.
Amid the usual ethical throng of experts, academics, monitors and fund managers, the three speakers at a plenary session on "integrating ethics" stood out: MCI, formerly known as Worldcom; Shell, of the famously flexible oil reserves; and the consultants PwC, fined $2.4m earlier that same week by the Securities and Exchange Commission for "aiding and abetting" reporting violations by the garment maker Warnaco.
Who says there's no such a thing as a second chance?