Call it sins of omission, being economical with the truth or just plain pulling the wool. It was always a problem in business, but with the rise of the ”green” movement it just got much worse as companies try to look socially responsible but regularly fail when it comes to the crunch.
A few days ago it took a new turn. Traditionally, ”greenwashing” has seen companies posing as environmentally friendly before some incident raised hard questions about the sincerity of their efforts.
This time it was in finance, in this case ANZ, which promotes itself as a ”new age” bank. ANZ is the world’s highest-ranking bank in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, but is not clean when it comes to coal. The bank continues lending money to coal operations, which are non grata in many quarters. The government’s carbon panels do not even invite them to join. Surprising then to hear Verve Energy suggesting the name of its banker at a WA coal mine had to be confidential - it turned out to be ANZ.
The incident raises the question: Can big business ever really do the right thing? Surely, the sheer scale of many such enterprises means there will be objectionable activity somewhere.
Unfortunately, one of the more popular methods of dealing with the problem is to let the very big company have a subsidiary with its own brand and let the public assume the two have nothing in common.
The outstanding example is the Body Shop. The retailer of ethical cosmetics sold out to L’Oreal, a notorious name in ethical investing that stood for everything the Body Shop was supposed to be against. L’Oreal is a company ethical investors regularly rallied against. It has a record on animal testing in cosmetics - not to mention a history of taking over Holocaust-era assets. The deal was sealed in 2006 but most shoppers don’t know the Body Shop is owned by L’Oreal.
The other day I found the subject before me again in a supermarket where I overhead two teenagers discussing the popular Green and Black chocolate, with its history of helping fair trade in the world’s poorest cocoa-growing regions. They were blissfully unaware that it is a subsidiary of Cadbury, a multinational corporation with roots in the colonial-era cocoa trade.
Then the other night on Channel Ten’s Undercover Boss there was high-profile Boost juice bar entrepreneur Janine Allis talking about her ”Boost army”. Boost trades heavily on the story of Janine and her building up a great independent company, promoting itself as a healthy, clean, environmentally friendly local enterprise.
Except that Boost is controlled by Riverside Group, a private equity operation in the US with interests in everything from animal feed to industrial chemicals.
The common thread here is companies not being 100 per cent upfront with customers about what they are, who owns them or, crucially, what their ultimate owners represent.
The most deceptive operations are where there is some vague, fashionable proposition of ethical or thoughtful business leadership when the company or its parent has a poor record in the area. There’s no law against it, but it’s an unwanted trend.
