DEAUVILLE, France--Business and ethics. Business and corruption. Business leaders who used to have to answer only to stockholders interested in profits now have to answer to citizens and governments who see the power wielded by multinationals doubly pernicious when it operates with bribes and payoffs and hides the money of drug traffickers, tax evaders and other criminals. 

Forum 21, organized by American lawyer Paul Weinstein to bring together French and American citizens to talk about key social issues, included a panel with investors and bankers and a journalist who writes about financial crime. The subject was ethics, corporate governance, transparency and dirty money.

 The journalist condemned banks that launder money. The businessmen--current and former top officials at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs, France Capital and ARJIL Assocates Bank--skirted that issue and declared that they’d never do anything unethical. 

Jean Francois Court, a banker, partner in ARJIL and a former official of the French Ministry of Finance, rejected out of hand the notion that banks should be blamed for laundering drug money. He said, “It is not the banker who gives cash to the drug dealers; it’s the people in America in the plush villas in Beverly Hills and the crack dealers in neighborhoods, and the drug dealers in France.” 

But Amy Bondurant, United States ambassador to the OECD, which has been focusing on the problem of international crime, said from the audience, “Over a trillion dollars is parked in offshore havens.” 

She described efforts to deal with the problem. She said, “The developed world is trying in the last few years to get a handle on it. There are proposals from the OECD tax committee, from the Financial Stability Forum, from entitles of the developed world to require better bank supervisory structures in these small undeveloped tax havens. There is an attempt to insure that when the developed world has information and is engaged in a lawsuit to seek tax information, the offshore havens will share and be transparent about information they have.” 

“Five years ago this issue of corruption in the business world was not discussed,” interjected Sandra Willet Jackson, a former US State Department official. She said government, business and civil society ought to publicize the real cost of corruption. 

In fact, a lot of attention is being paid, and business seems to be getting a message. “Never before has the task of managing growth and profitability while adhering to higherst ethical and professional standards been greater,” said Reuben Jeffrey, managing director of Goldman Sachs, the giant international investment bankers. He said the Seattle demonstrators had effectively communicated their skepticism about business. The answer to that, he said, was that “the busiiness community has to do a better job in communicating on issues of social importance.” 

He said business needs forums at which to discuss issues such as the consequences of its operations on the environment, the impact on children of violence in entertainment, the issue of financial services providing credit to those least able to get it, and the distribution and pricing of life-saving drugs.

 “To avoid anti-business rhetoric and slogans, business has to do a better job of anticipating and communicating on issues of social and political importance and to find the right forums where they can be discussed,” Jeffrey said. It was unclear whether these discussions might lead to changes of company policy or were public relations attempts to defuse criticism. 

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