The story of News International rumbles on, with the British government, the FBI in America and the Australian government all seeking face to face time with Rupert Murdoch. The Murdoch holdings in News International are 20% making them the largest shareholder, but there are other significant corporate investors with money tied up in the group. Rupert Murdoch is an American citizen and as such cannot be forced to appear before the British government to explain the current situation, or indeed any other, so if political forces are not fully able to hold senior figures in global corporations to account, it does rather beg the question who is?
Many large corporations have layers of control in the upper echelons of the company, with a controlling board made up of executive and non-executive directors. The executive directors have a direct responsibility for the operation of the company and for strategy and direction as a whole. The role of the non-executives is rather more nebulous, but in the main their function is to provide the checks and balances of the corporate strategy overseeing decisions from a standpoint of ethical and moral accountability. In this role they often look after the remuneration of executives, the overall direction of the corporation, and how the corporation interacts with the wider world. However, many non-executive board members have multiple boards that they sit on, and are at least to an extent, potentially conflicted by the need for the corporate entity to succeed. Additionally these are often appointed positions arranged by the board themselves and as such do not give the opportunity for input from outside the corporate structure.
This leaves one other source of control of the Worlds biggest companies, and that is the shareholders. By buying shares in a company, one in effect becomes, in a very small way, a part owner of the company, and as such is, in that same small way, personally responsible for the actions of that company. Shareholders can attend the annual general meeting of the company, and is entitled to raise any concerns. Of course, in the real World, an organisation such as News International with a book value in excess of $100bn would not necessarily give much consideration to the input of someone with say $1000 worth of shares, but many of these corporates are in the main owned by intitutional investment companies who own much larger stakes. This gives these institutions, typically finance house much more say in operational matters and in ethical and moral guidance, and these financial institutions also get their money, at root from small investors through aggregation.
In my opinion, given the frequency with which large corporate entities are making headlines for their actions, there is a duty of every single person who invests in the Worlds stock markets, whether that be directly, or through their pension scheme, or through bundled financial investments such as ISA's or any other route, to investigate how and where their money is being invested, and to challenge anything that they, as an individual would be uncomfortable with. It is time for each of us, as individulas to take personal responsibility for our actions, even if we, in the past have abrogated that right and allowed financial institutions far to much freedom with our money. I firmly believe that it is only by understanding that every action we take, or don't take has implications, and accepting personal responsibility for those implications, that we will finally understand that we are, as a species all linked together, and that we must all look after each other.....
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