Path to Transparency

Our stories have proven that it is the business world that crashes the majority of citizens who have become whistleblowers. It is the world in which changes will come in terms of legal and moral obligations and because of the Internet world in which not a single piece of information nowadays stays hidden. The change as far as operating mode is concerned will take place thanks to staff representatives and honest elected representatives who will not hesitate to fight hard when problems occur. The stakes are high when one knows the figures relating to work suffering, the number of employees on sick leave, the ones suffering a burn-out and a depression. What could be the reasons for a company director to make his employees weakened if it is not to keep a certain type of power, to continue to ‘divide and rule’?

The author Laurent Gounelle (Laurent Gounelle, Les dieux voyagent toujours incognito, Pocket, Paris, 2012) deciphers the strategy to adopt when facing an “enemy”: “If you take his place, then you can understand why he acts as such. […] When you spread energy to convince somebody, it is as if you were sending in his direction a force exerted on him, that pushes him. He feels it and it leads him to push in the opposite direction. Push him, he will push you back”. “One does not push, one pulls. Pushing means leave from your position and being willing to impose it on the other one. Pulling means to leave from the position of the other one and bring him little by little to oneself”. My letter to the President of UBS relating to the creation and development of an ‘International Ethical Funds’, co-written with Alexandre Boisson, expert in systemic risks has never received an answer.

At the end of 2020, the media informed us that the justice of The Netherlands had opened an investigation relating to money laundering where Mr. Ralph Hamers, a former ING top manager, is involved. The latter had just been hired tobecome the new UBS president, succeeding Sergio Ermotti. Mr. Hamers has been recruited although his past was known and had been taken into consideration by the UBS Board of Directors (20minutes.ch – Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020).

The two examples described above demonstrate that it is impossible to make our former employers change their habits in other words to push them towards ethical economic models. We will then have to pull them, as suggested by Laurent Gounelle.

Ida de Chavagnac, the French whistleblower who has worked for the Credit Agricole agrees with this strategy when she writes that “the only solution to break the cult of secrecy would b