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Barely a day goes by at the moment here in Canada without a new twist or turn in a corruption story hitting the headlines. Last week we got news of SNC Lavalin offering an amnesty for any employees providing information about their huge ongoing bribery scandal. The police also announced last week  their intent to extradite Dr Arthur Porter for his part in allegedly receiving $22m in return for granting a contract to SNC to build the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper's government is embroiled in a major, and very persistent, scandal involving an attempted cover-up of some dodgy expenses claims by a conservative senator. This involved Harper's (now resigned) Chief of Staff giving a "gift" of $90,000 to Senator Mike Duffy to reimburse his questionable claim and stave off any further the investigation. Oh, and who can ignore the now internationally ridiculed mayor of Toronto, who in the wake of allegations about him being caught on...

Ethics in sports has become a big talking point. In North America, we are just at the end of a humongous news cycle on Lance Armstrong’s ‘ confessions ’ on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Armstrong’s story very much turned – as many ethical issues tend to – into a story of character, personal integrity and individual morality. Even though most people know by now that doping in cycling is endemic and that he is probably much more the product of entrenched practices in the business of professional cycling. We have commented on ethics in sports here and there in the past and this week’s installment of scandals in professional sports seems another good occasion to add some observations from a business ethics angle. We are talking about the news  from Europol (the pan-European crime investigation unit) revealing large-scale match fixing activity in global professional football (or soccer, for our North American readers). They claim to having identified 380 manipulated games (at all levels) and ...

The list of prominent leaders being turfed out of office for ethics violations seems to be growing at an exponential rate. Here in Canada, Toronto mayor Rob Ford's ouster this week for breaking conflict of interest rules is no less than the third Canadian city major to bite the dust this month due to questions of integrity (the others, Gerald Tremblay of Montreal and Gilles Vaillancourt of Laval both resigned without admitting any guilt in face of corruption investigations).  In the last month we've also seen the Director of the CIA in the US, David Patreus resign due to an admission of "extremely poor judgement" in conducting an extramarital affair. The same week, the incoming CEO of the multinational defense company Lockheed Martin resigned over "a close personal relationship" with a subordinate. Even Hurricane Sandy took its toll with the resignation of the CEO of the Long Island Power Authority after thousands of its customers were left without electrici...

It's that time of year again when we consider the big news events around corporate responsibility during the past twelve months. It has undoubtedly been a significant year, with some stories potentially having a huge impact on future corporate responsibility practice or government policy. Nuclear accidents, protests galore, high level corruption - there's been a lot of ugliness again this year. But sometimes you've got to go down before you can go up. Let's hope 2011 will be looked back on as the year that business finally woke up to the new realities of corporate responsibility. 1. Fukushima nuclear disaster As with the BP oil leak in 2010 , no corporate responsibility story dominated the media in the same way that Fukushima did. And for good reason. The world's second worst nuclear disaster (after Chernobyl) slammed home just how risky the nuclear industry could be. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the company operating the plant, has had to shoulder a lot of the bla...

India, a country of cricket fanatics, has been in serious celebration mode since the national team's thrilling victory in the cricket world cup last weekend. News and media outlets here have covered little else for days. It's been front page news in the national press and all the rolling news programmes have been swamped with wall-to-wall coverage. Now though, as the euphoria starts to die down after Sunday's big victory, attention is beginning to turn to another major issue facing the country - corruption. The big question is though, will India be as victorious in fighting corruption as it has been at fighting its cricketing rivals. And the answer, we fear, is almost certainly no. Corruption has been a serious problem in India for longer than anyone cares to remember. At 87th, it currently ranks about half way up the Corruption Perception Index from Transparency International. A score of 3.3 (out of a possible 10) suggests a major corruption problem. But recent eve...

It’s been quite a week or so for transparency. The incendiary WikiLeaks release of almost a quarter of a million classified cables from the US diplomatic service has set news media across the world alight with daily revelations that have acutely embarrassed politicians everywhere. Last week also saw the FIFA bribery scandal reach new heights with the screening of the BBC Panorama program alleging corruption, followed by last Thursday’s selection of Russia and Qatar as the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups respectively. Yes, that’s Russia, the country labeled a “virtual mafia state” in one of the WikiLeaks cables. Both cases involve a whole host of ethical issues, but perhaps more than anything they pose critical questions about the appropriate limits of transparency. How much should we know about what goes on behind the scenes in organizations such as the US diplomatic service or a global sporting body such as FIFA? And can too much transparency really be a bad thing? WikiLeaks i...

"All I ask for is an unfair advantage.” Reputedly a favourite line of Hank Greenberg, the former Chair and CEO of AIG, it makes for an apposite tagline for a leader forced to resign by his own board as a result of investigations into financial impropiety. The Greenberg investigations were instigated by then New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, who made a habit of making enemies amongst the city's most powerful  corporate leaders during his uncompromising campaign to prosecute corporate misconduct. And as writer and director Alex Gibney argues in Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer it was the foes he created in his day job as much as the night time friends he sought among the high class escort world that ultimately brought him down. Gibney, the oscar winning documentary maker of Taxi to the Dark Side , Casino Jack , and Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room , is no stranger to the twilight morality of big business, and the powerplays of American politics. In C...