The £11m pay-out now being made to the disgraced MG Rover 5, bringing their total ill-gotten gains to £42m, raises yet again the neglected issue of corporate ethics which are now in their worst state for decades. The understandable feeling among the workforce who lost their jobs overnight, had their pensions cut and got only basic statutory redundancy pay, is that they should be taken to the courts for fraud. In fact the Phoenix 4 were extremely careful to follow legal advice whilst elaborately extracting over £40m from the company wind-up which should have been put into the workers’ trust fund that they set up before the company failed in 2005. Instead they paid much of the money into an offshore trust registered in Guernsey. The fact that the report finally published into MG Rover two months ago did not accuse them of actual law-breaking (though being acutely critical of their behaviour) prompts again the urgent need to establish OPSE – a statutory Office to regulate Private Sector Ethics. Several other scandals in recent weeks and months justify the same requirement.

Trafigura, a British private oil-trader, the third biggest in the world, dumped hundreds of tonnes of lethal sulphur-contaminated gasoline on wasteland around Abidjan in west Africa which caused at least 15 deaths, 70 persons hospitalised and over 100,000 consultations with doctors, and then spent 3 years intimidating all those who threatened to expose the scandal. The plan (some might say that conspiracy is not too strong a word) between MOD, BAE, and Qinetiq to subordinate safety to cost-cutting led to the deaths of all 14 crew members on board the Nimrod reconnaissance plane that blew up over Helmand in September 2006, as the official report into the crash made damningly clear, yet no-one has been prosecuted.
The boardrooms of the top banks culpably failed to understand, let alone supervise, what was going on in their trading departments during 2005-8 which has already cost the taxpayer nearly £100bn and could cost up to £1 trillion at the final tally. Yet none of the culprits guilty of the most extreme and most costly corporate maladministration have been prosecuted or called to account by public inquiry.
An EU investigation of the pharma sector found that major firms had struck at least 200 settlements with generics manufacturers in order to block access for patients to cheaper generic drugs, especially in developing countries, leading the Competition Commissioner to conclude that “there is something rotten in the state of the pharmaceutical industry”. The allegation of massive bribery by BAE to win enormous arms deals with Saudi Arabia and at least 4 other countries in the 1980-90s has been reopened, and Mabey and Johnson, a UK bridge building company, has recently been found guilty of paying bribes to gain orders in Jamaica, Iraq and Ghana.
There is a crying need for OPSE. I intend to campaign for it up, through, and after the election.

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