Atlantic Copper, KPMG, Lilly and NH Hotel Group agree at ESADE on the importance of promoting an ethical culture across the value chain

‘Leadership is not improvised; active anti-corruption policies require adequate leadership management’, said Ignasi Carreras, director of the ESADE Institute for Social Innovation, speaking at the talk ‘Active anti-corruption policies’. The event was organised jointly by the SERES Foundation and ESADE to learn about and share the measures taken by Atlantic Copper, KPMG, Lilly and the NH Hotel Group to promote ethical policies at companies.

In her opening remarks, Ana Sainz, director of the SERES Foundation, emphasised the crystallisation of anti-corruption measures and levers at Spanish organisations with a solid commitment to implementing good practices. Sainz also underscored the importance of one of the main themes of the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum, namely, the need for ‘responsive and responsible leadership in governments, companies and civil society, to lay out a roadmap for the next year’.

Measures and policies adopted to combat corruption

‘Corruption is an important issue that needs to be addressed’, said Marta Martín, director of Corporate Responsibility and Internal Communication at NH Hotel Group, and tackling it ‘is part of the ethical management of our company’. To this end, the company has developed and put into place a compliance model and a code of ethics, two actions that directly affect its corporate governance and are intended to ‘promote a culture of responsibility and apply it in our everyday activities, with regard to both our various stakeholders and our people’, Martín explained. 

Javier Targhetta, president of Atlantic Copper and senior vice president for Marketing & Sales at Freeport-McMoRan, noted that his company’s industry [mining] is subject to ‘greater regulation’. To this end they have a ‘compliance officer in each unit and a monitoring committee that reports directly to the board of directors’. For Targhetta, the fundamental values of anti-corruption policies are ‘integrity, respect, excellence, commitment, adaptation and anticipation of change’.

In the pharmaceutical sector, Lilly shares this vision of transmitting and promoting ethical policies across its value chain with a view to fostering a culture rather than mere disclosure, that is, for it ‘not to be a matter of faith or fashion, but rather a constant issue present in the discourse of our most senior executives’, said Javier Ellena, president of Lilly Spain, Greece and Portugal. By way of example, Elena mentioned ‘the voluntary publication of value transfers between organisations and health professionals’. In his view, this was a ‘necessary’ step and one that ‘should be replicated in other industries’.

For José Luis Blasco, a partner and head of Governance, Risk and Compliance at KPMG, corruption ‘is the main limiting factor on the exercise of people’s rights’. ‘If we look at the trends in the field of anti-corruption policies, we can see four main categories: international cooperation, implementation of self-reporting, voluntariness, and the outsourcing of CSR’, he added. In this regard, he highlighted that ‘changing how we communicate and work on risk areas is key to conveying an ethical culture to our value chains’.

In his concluding remarks, Carreras noted that companies take two attitudes towards dealing with corruption: some ‘are committed and take decisive steps to end corruption’ whilst others ‘simply conform to it’.