Buhlmann's Corner

“Can a Company sin?”

Yes, the theologian Justin Welby responds in his doctoral thesis. In his position as 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, it is his task to crown the British king or queen, and with this view he is on the governmental Commission which is to take the (British) financial industry under the microscope.

Whether the question of sin also concerns crowned heads, or whether he also attributes sinful behaviour to government leaders, is not revealed. Nor is there any evident reason why one should take only the financial world as the target here – that financial world that has just been removed from the national regulators, to monitor under the leadership of the European Central Bank what they had not managed to themselves.

Is it a sin if a company like ACS buys another company like Hochtief – only so as to prettify the consolidated figures and then sit down to dine on the fleshpots of the 55% subsidiary?

Is it a sin if between yesterday and today a company invests its total market value in cash items, with the result that the investment can still not be sold written down to half – as at ThyssenKrupp? Where the directors are first kept, after costly reports, and then fired after equally costly reports, and compensation, by those who previously hired them, then advised and accompanied them, and now look down on them from the heights of power, quite surprised?

Is it a sin if Daimler shareholders’ money is used to pursue national objectives and tasks, only for the EADS shares then to be offered to those unwilling to pay any premium to the owners for this trusteeship service?

Is investment banking really a sin for banks, but investment banking at BASF, which has bought up so much bio in the last few weeks and months it will be soon the market leader, is not? The swapping of gas trading for bio looks more like a flagship model for private equity – although the owners have only a single point of codecision....

Nobody has a greater say in all this than through the door to the trading floor, and nobody expects the owner to assume a responsibility either for or against in all this. The distance between ownership – in the sense of the beneficial owner – and responsibility has on the one hand become so long and on the other so opaque that it is hardly surprising if no one knows that he has to go to the Archbishop of Canterbury to confess. Who is the sinner and who is the henchman – no, in the new language the service provider, whose service consists only in acknowledging responsibility which otherwise no one wishes to exercise?

There’s something else – German Supervisory Board members are now, after their fees were racked up in the Code Commission for years “because of the liability,” to be discharged of it – and in virtue of a coming law they have to be trained. This is done out of the coffers of the company – i.e. the shareholders. And you can be sure that tomorrow’s reports (on the joint liability of those members) will then say: actually they should be liable, but the instructor is sinful and is guilty. Canterbury is in the Anglican Church – in the Catholic Church 1000 years ago (from 500 to the 16th century) , there was a trade in indulgences regulated in penitential books – was that a different thing from today’s practice of reports and service providers?