He is“not asking for us to come clean about our involvement in [the SA Revenue Service] specifically. He’s asking us to come clean about our involvement with Zuma and Moyane and the purpose of the conversations Bain had with them. I interpret that as he wants us to come clean about any involvement in state capture ... ” — John Senior, managing partner Bain & Co SA.
Business Leadership SA (BLSA)’s public defence of its decision to welcome Bain & Co as a member is both tragic and comedic. It is tragic that business leaders in our country have strayed so far from the purpose of business, to serve humanity. A comedy in that the explanations offered are so void of logic or fact as to make them laughable.
However, BLSA’s defence of a company that stands at the heart of attempts to undermine our democratic institutions is no laughing matter. It demonstrates the danger of normalising corporate crime and the unjustifiably sacred place we offer corporations because they bring investment and offer jobs, even when they often erode the moral fabric of our society.
This is what is at stake when a prominent organisation such as BLSA embraces as a member a company the Zondo commission identified as colluding with former president Jacob Zuma and erstwhile SA Revenue Service (Sars) commissioner Tom Moyane, and whose involvement at Sars was characterised as “unlawful”.
BLSA CEO Busi Mavuso even goes beyond the Zondo commission’s report to state unequivocally that Bain “committed terrible crimes”. It’s a bone-chilling admission to make about one of her organisation’s members.
Yet rather than express outrage at what this company has done to our society, or demanding immediate prosecution, Mavuso proudly proclaims that Bain enjoys full membership of BLSA, which represents our country’s largest companies and is overseen by a 12-person board that includes Adrian Enthoven of Hollard, Mike Brown of Nedbank, Shameel Joosub of Vodacom, Leila Fourie of the JSE, and Nonkululeko Nyembezi, who sits on the boards of Anglo American and Standard Bank.
There is considerable ethical and logical distance to travel from admitting that a company is involved in criminal activity to defending your decision to welcome them as a member. In a radio interview with Bruce Whitfield on January 11 Mavuso made three startling claims to indicate how the captains of corporate SA try to cover this vast ethical and logical distance.
First, Mavuso indicated that punishing Bain would be misguided because “we don’t think there is any organisation that is beyond reproach”. In other words, the claim is that since all companies are bad we should not hold Bain accountable.
I wonder if BLSA’s members accept this indictment. Mavuso explained: “The environment within which we operated in SA at the time was so toxic that it almost got everyone involved.” Perhaps authorities should be questioning BLSA about what it knows about its members’ criminal activity.
Mavuso’s second startling claim is that since companies cannot be jailed they cannot be held accountable. It is a claim barely worthy of comment. Rather than hold the corporate entity accountable, Mavuso insists only the leadership, as individuals, can be held accountable, never mind that companies are regularly penalised for wrongdoing through fines, blacklisting and other forms of sanction.
The third startling claim smacks of the gullibility Bain would no doubt have exploited. Since by Mavuso’s logic only individuals can be held accountable, and since she believes all those at Bain involved in the “terrible crimes” have left the firm, she concludes that Bain is clean and we should move on. That is faulty logic unsupported by fact.
A quick visit to Bain’s website shows that two members of Vittorio Massone’s leadership team are still with the company — Fabrice Franzen, mentioned in the Zondo report, and Stephane Timpano. So too are Paul Meehan, Massone’s boss at the time, and Bob Bechek, Meehan’s boss at the time. Mavuso seems to believe, or wants us to believe, that since these people’s business cards show non-SA addresses they were, or are, not involved in what happens in SA.
She talks of “new leadership” in SA, referring to John Senior, whose email to global colleagues is quoted above. Senior is not new to Bain but a veteran, handpicked by headquarters in Boston, just as Massone was. Mavuso boldly states that if this “new leadership” is involved in any wrongdoing BLSA would not merely suspend Bain but expel it. Yet this is exactly what Senior is doing by withholding critical information that would aid our country’s efforts to understand the full extent of state capture.
This refusal to make full public disclosure compelled the Zondo report to recommend that all of Bain’s public sector work be re-examined. Just like it refused to co-operate with the Nugent commission, it has also refused to co-operate with the Zondo commission, according to the commission’s report. Yet as the opening email extract shows, Senior and his colleagues know fully what is required of Bain.
That BLSA is willing to look the other way when members act corruptly is clear for all to see. Legitimising and whitewashing Bain’s “unlawful” behaviour reveals the ethical poverty of the organisation, despite all the PR around its integrity pledge. It demonstrates the exceptionalism big business assumes for itself; that it stands apart from the rest of society and so should be held to a lower ethical standard. It is this ethical poverty that drives the economic poverty we suffer in our country.
BLSA and its members need to return to basics, to remind themselves of their purpose — that businesses are created by people for people, that business is not an end in itself but a tool to serve humanity. Any organisation that behaves as if apart from society will lose its relevance and social legitimacy.
The best the business community can do to support SA’s fight against state capture is not to make token offers of support to law enforcement authorities. Rather, it should clean up its own act. A good start would be for BLSA to act according to its CEO’s statement and expel Bain. And then it should proceed to reorientate corporate SA to align with the interests of the rest of society.
• Williams, a business ethics scholar who is a former partner at Bain, testified before the Zondo commission. He is author of ‘Deep Collusion: Bain and the capture of SA’.
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