Power speaks to power

In my previous post, A redacted abuse of power, I spoke of my attempts to draw the behaviour of a fraudulent CEO to the attention of the UN, which accredits his company, and that I expected a decision to be made at this month's meeting of the Executive Board of the Clean Development Mechanism.

The report of this meeting has now been published and, with this sentence, followed by a list of companies including the one concerned, they simply state "The Board took note of the notifications by the CDM-AP on the positive outcome of the regular on-site surveillances of the following entities:" 

Quite how there could have been a positive outcome when a proven fraud is in charge of the day to day running of the company is only a mystery if you fail, like me, to realise that power speaks to power. I suspect that two factors played a major role in their decision.

Firstly, there is a strong political need to have a company based in that particular continent and I can quite easily imagine that, just like the bankers who threaten to up sticks whenever anyone threatens their bonuses, the CEO simply threatened to close the company down if action was taken against him.

Secondly, there was an element of culpability in that they had previously approved changes in management structure that left one individual as majority shareholder, CEO, Chairman and, at the time, the sole director.  Whilst the risks involved in this are obvious, and have manifest themselves, so too would be the embarrassment of admitting that this mistake had been made.

However, this raises two further questions. If the UN is there to serve all of the world's people on an equitable basis then it shouldn't kowtow to the powerful simply because they have power. There's enough of that going on already.

Secondly, in the absence of any procedure for whistleblowers, such abuses are likely to continue.

The CDM is a heavily rule based system and, to do its job, it needs to be. But unless the rules are seen to be applied fairly, and to all parties, the entire system runs the risk of going into disrepute.

When I pointed out to the leader of the Accreditation Team that the CEO's qualifications were fakes his first response was "if that's true then we can't trust anything and we might as well go home now". In retrospect I wish that I hadn't then sought to reassure him that this was just a management issue and that I trusted the work being done by the company's actual assessors. I did not want the decent, but vulnerable, people in the company to lose their jobs.