Why Asia must look beyond profits to ethics

Asian business leaders need to blink. Like rabbits caught in a spotlight, they seem genuinely bewildered by the fuss in the west about corporate governance and ethics. They are incredulous at being required to explain their actions over corporate responsibility, governance, environmental management and ethics – regimes their own governments are not imposing on them.

The high-stakes play for the US-based energy group Unocal is a lesson for China’s CNOOC oil group. It showed that cash alone would not seal the deal, especially when there were questions about possible easy loans from its state-owned parent that go to the heart of the corporate governance and ethics debate. There were other considerations for Washington, but these blew into a political storm and clouded the debate.

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