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outside executive control. A definite separation
of powers. Frankly, it didn’t work in my case. I
had very strong written feedback from the audit
committee but nevertheless when the chief
executive fired me, they turned turtle. If they had
supported me then the chief executive would
have to have gone.’
There remains some talk - in the
financial sector particularly - about
heads of risk being on boards, but
nothing substantial has happened,
says Moore. A chief executive can
still remove ‘trouble makers’ by
presenting it as redundancy or a
cultural ‘not fitting in’, he says.
Moore’s integrity cost him his
job - and changed his life. ‘Until
there’s proper protection for GC
positions, plus the whole answer to
legal privilege, then it’s still very risky,’ he says.
‘It’s a self-evident truth that there was nothing
in it for me in raising the HBOS concerns, but
nevertheless I was allowed to be replaced by
a sales manager as head of risk.’ Someone
who had never advised on risk management in
their life.
Shortly after Northern Rock went down there
was a job going as head of risk with the troubled
UK finance company. ‘But,’ says Moore, ‘I was
told by the headhunter I was too hot to handle.’
Moore’s story echoes that of whistleblower,
Oliver Budde who has not worked in-house since
his resignation from Lehman in 2006. As with
Moore, his concerns soon proved justified, but
this doesn’t seem to have been enough. ‘Once
you have become a whistleblower,’ he says, ‘you
definitely are too hot to handle, as the sense is:
“There’s a person who dares to speak their mind
and so is of less utility to your typical management
team than one who will be interested in keeping
the salary going and shutting up as called for.”’
Budde’s advice for lawyers who feel they need to
report wrongdoing is to ‘have a rainy day nest egg
put away, because standing up for your integrity
may mean you sacrifice your career.’ A stark
choice, it would seem.
But for Budde it goes back to the bigger ethical
question for business and its legal representation
as whole. ‘It’s a sad state of affairs, but if there
were no incentives for managements to go after
these illegal or unethical additional profits, then
there wouldn’t be a problem.’
Are lawyers collateral damage, suffocated by
a corporate miasma on Wall Street? The answer
is simple, says Budde, who feels the legal
profession as a whole has avoided some difficult
issues raised by the global financial crisis and its
own inability to blow the whistle.
‘Lawyers as a group need to come clean
about their participation in the global financial
crisis. One thing no one ever talks about is
the lawyer’s role in the crisis. But none of the
bad things we have read about, not a single
one, would have happened without a sign-off
at one or more key points from a lawyer.
Someone in the legal department said
“go ahead”.’
‘IDEAS OF FAIRNESS AREN’T PROTECTED
BY WHISTLEBLOWING. ONLY ACTUAL
BREACHES OF LAWOR REGULATION.
YOU HAVE GOT TO BE ABLE TO PROVE
THERE IS A BREACH OF THE LAW.’