Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

To ensure the sustainability of the financial center, Governing authorities must be aware of the changes to the geopolitics and the geoeconomics : we live at a time of transparence and governance with various programs (OECD, World Bank...).

Governing authorities must ask questions and accept questions especially on compliance issues. They must tighten up the ship on issues all the more than there are alternative financial centers for investors and head offices of banks. Otherwise they weaken their international credibility.

The failure to ask or to answer questions allows these authorities (either political or professional) to operate with a distorted sense of reality. In fact, Finkelstein calls companies that are unable to question their prevailing view of reality zombies. A zombie company, he says, is “a walking corpse that just doesn’t yet know that it’s dead—because this company has created an insulated culture that systematically excludes any information that could contradict its reigning picture of reality”.

This is true as well for a financial center.

Some are aware of that. For example, Marcus Killick (Chairman and Commissioner, Gibraltar Financial Services Commission) : "Our stakeholders have a right to criticise not merely our actions but the culture an methodology that underlies them. More importantly, we believe, by understanding our approach, our actions become, in themselves, clearer and therefore more transparent." he wrote.

Other refuse and may be contemptuous enough to put on the black list mails from senders that contradict their reigning picture of reality : For example I received the message "501 5.7.1 This system is not configured to relay mail from " from an official representative body for the investment fund industry that moreover had previously never replied to my questions about public breaches of the code of ethics (that is no longer online).



To go further

Zombie Businesses: How to Learn from Their Mistakes
Reputation: Riks of risks

Bibliography

Finkelstein, Sydney. "Zombie Businesses: How to Learn from Their Mistakes" Leader to Leader. 32 (Spring 2004), pp 29-35.

Finkelstein, Sydney, Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes. Portfolio Hardcover, 2003 ; and the translation in French : Finkelstein (S.), Quand les grands patrons se plantent . Paris, Editions d’Organisation, 2004.