And the board is much more than all of this. The board is also the personification of the ‘corporate governance’. It is the members of the board who determine the guidelines for the executives to conduct the business. The board is composed of the shareholders’ representatives as well as the chairman and the global CEO. So, I asked the board to help me because it is the ‘highest authority’ in and out of the corporate walls. By the content of the letter, it was evident that the scheme of fraud and corruption that I had reported had metastasised throughout the company. When I appealed to the ethics committee of the company’s Brazilian subsidiary, the CEO sent me an answer. When I returned to my functions, I was fired.
DOUGLAS LINARES FLINTO CODE
No breach of the code of ethics had been verified and no misappropriation of money had been proven.
I imagined that situations of this magnitude should be conducted in this way to ‘protect’ the whistleblower.Ī few weeks later, during my vacation, the company conducted an ‘internal audit’.
Nor was I praised for my attitude in guarding the name, the reputation and the equity of the company. According to my surveys, the looting of the company’s coffers was more than $20million a year.ĭespite the seriousness of the facts, the commercial director and the general manager of internal audit, didn’t give me any guidance on how I should proceed from that moment. The illegal activities and illegalities I had discovered also involved various types of conflicts of interests and even the issuing of ‘cold invoices’.
To fulfil the words and spirit of the code of ethics of one of the largest oil companies on the planet, I had to report to management a multi-million fraud and corruption scheme in the regional sales department, for which I had temporarily assumed responsibility. Douglas Linares Flinto – Chairman & CEO at Brazilian Business Ethics Instituteįifteen years ago, I lived through a professional experience that I imagined was something rare in the business world.
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