Transparent desire
BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, stepped down this week, after he accepted he had not been “fully transparent” with the energy giant’s board about his relationships at work with colleagues. Cue much media coverage and plenty of questions for board members about what they knew of Looney’s reputation and when.
But also there’s been much reheating of old stories about executive indiscretions. That prompted a warning in The Times about the rise of special clauses asking execs to tell all before taking on their new jobs.
Beth Hale, an employment lawyer with CM Murray, tells The Times: “It’s still quite unusual for employers to have an absolute ban, but it is more and more common for them to have disclosure obligations…”.
And this because it seems, in BP’s case, the issue for Looney was not the actual relationships he was having, but that he was not being entirely candid with the board about just how many there were. So now at least one member has to be designated relationship counsellor. Hands up, anyone?
Transparent request
Consultation on the new corporate governance code closes this week with views, pouring into the Financial Reporting Council’s postbag: some of them, a warm embrace… some of them, a punch in the throat.
Anyway, reg spotters at the ACCA, an accountancy body, want code wranglers to shore up governance by asking boards to disclose their methods when they report on their monitoring of risk management and internal controls (it should be pointed out here that internal controls are a massive issue in the new code).
Mike Suffield, policy director at ACCA, says: “The debilitating misalignment we found across all industries in our recent risk culture study was largely due to blind spots and failures in governance. Boards must ensure continuous monitoring of the governance framework and that the process for doing so is clearly defined and communicated.” Monitoring is not just for Christmas.
Transparent ceiling
Boards have been under pressure to appoint more women, with some of the greatest pressure coming from fund managers, many of whom have demanded greater diversity.
It now turns out the fund managers aren’t doing well themselves when it comes to female representation among the 18,000 or so money managers in the UK.
This week, Baroness Morrisey, founder of the 30% Club, a campaign for more women in boardrooms, called on fund managers to sort things out. Apparently, only 12% of money managers are women, way behind, er, … 30%.
“If firms mean what they say about viewing this [gender progress] as an incredibly important topic, they should be giving twice as many new funds proportionately to female managers,” Morrisey tells The Times. Aha! People who live in glass houses, eh?