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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Corporate whistleblowers are rarely celebrated. More often they are seen as the enemy within — marginalised or blacklisted after speaking out. Little wonder that there is a push in the UK to create an independent body for insiders to have a clearer and safer route to disclose misconduct.
A private member’s bill — due for its second reading in the Commons later this month — seeks to establish an Office of the Whistleblower to centralise and triage disclosures, enforce standards and preserve anonymity as well as redress for those who take personal and professional risks to speak up.
While the bill has some cross-party support, it has no real champion in government. Labour, already facing criticism for anti-business policies, will be reluctant to back anything that could be framed as introducing more red tape. As one FTSE chair said, the mere idea of this body screams “more regulation, costs and time”.
Yet the case for reform is clear. High profile examples of failure are plentiful — from the Post Office Horizon scandal to Barclays’ whistleblowing probe. “There is an endless list,” says Baroness Susan Kramer, who has been pushing for support for the bill. The poor handling of whistleblower disclosures is as much an issue for public institutions as the corporate world. “From the contaminated blood scandal to Grenfell, these could have been caught early...
A Guatemalan national residing in the U.S. illegally has been indicted for his alleged role in smuggling a 14-year-old girl into the country. Juan Tiul Xi, 26, was indicted on Thursday for alleged...