Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton have come up tops in a recent report by anticorruption group Transparency International, placing second and third respectively out of 105 largest publicly traded companies, with Norway’s Statoil taking the highest ranking.
The report analysed the transparency of corporate reporting on a range of anticorruption measures among the 105 companies, which were collectively worth more than $11 trillion and operated across 200 countries.
Company scores were based on public availability of information about anticorruption systems, transparency in reporting on how they structure themselves and the amount of financial information they provide for each country they operate in. The report stated that a lack of transparency made it more difficult to identify where companies earned profits, paid taxes or contributed to political campaigns. “Multinational companies remain an important part of the problem of corruption around the world. The time has come for them to be coleading the solutions. For this, they need to dramatically improve,” said Transparency International MD Cobus de Swardt.
The report echoed sentiments issued by Rio chairperson Jan du Plessisearlier this year, when he said that major corporations had to regain the trust lost during the global financial crisis.
Du Plessis had urged multinationals and large corporations to reassess how business was done, and to proactively explain operations to numerous stakeholders, adding that large companies had to respond to public and shareholder perceptions.
Mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton have come up tops in a recent report by anticorruption group Transparency International, placing second and third respectively out of 105 largest publicly traded companies, with Norway’s Statoil taking the highest ranking.