Ethics Resource Center

Published: March 25, 2010

January Fellows Meeting Retrospective

Leo Wise, Special Director and Chief Counsel for the Office of Government Ethics discussed his experience in the prosecution of Enron executives to shed light on the role they had in the creation of a poisonous culture. Using some of the same materials from the trial, he explained the prosecution’s strategy and how they were able to trace the company’s failings back to those in charge. Jurors were shown evidence of a corporate culture that stressed beating Wall Street projections no matter the cost and that kept employees quiet through intimidation.

*No transcript is available for this presentation*

Michael Oxley, chairman of ERC’s Board of Directors, related his experiences crafting the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to the current efforts to effectively regulate the financial industry and craft appropriate executive compensation structures.

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Kenneth Feinberg, Special Master for Executive Compensation, outlined his role in determining pay packages for top executives at the five major firms receiving TARP bailout funds.

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A panel consisting of Kenneth Feinberg, Michael Oxley and John Castellani, President of the Business Roundtable, and moderated by Greg Ip, U.S. Economics Editor for The Economist, discussed the extent to which the government can impact ethical leadership, particularly through the regulation of executive compensation.

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In This Issue

• The Importance of Leadership in Times of Crisis. Column By Patricia J. Harned, Ph.D. President, ERC
• Patricia J Harned, ERC President, testifies before the United States Sentencing Commission
  
• The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business. Book Review By Kyle Goetschius
  
• A Case for Cooperation: the Defense Industry Initiative
• ERC Honors the Late Carol Marshall with the 2009 Pace Award
• January Fellows Meeting Retrospective