Companies urged to do more to encourage business ethics

Tightening up the legal framework and law enforcement are not enough to ensure an ethical behaviour among the city's business people, according to regulators and business leaders at a forum last week.

Companies have to play a more active role, encouraging their employees not only to make money but also do the right thing, they say.

"Executives are not being incentivised by good ethics. We are incentivised by the actual return of the company, the share prices, the bonuses," Bernard Chan Charnwut, the president of Asia Financial Holdings, said on the sidelines of the conference. "The board has to put in systems to make sure that they don't incentivise the executives based on performance only. There should be enough incentive for people with good ethics as well."

Meena Datwani, the director-general of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's enforcement division, said the main problem was the pressure to perform and to achieve higher profits.

"It's not sustainable. There should be other values making sure it's a win-win for everybody," she said. "It's not just the shareholders at the cost of the customers.

"We should reward honesty, integrity, fairness, acting in the best interest of customers and not whoever generates the best profit or sells the most products."