Though ethical deception (informally well known as 'bending the rules') still prevails with high magnitude, it was upgraded to a high level by one person starting from the 1950s. This person was a very popular business tycoon in India who started from the streets to create an empire of his own. His name was Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of Reliance Industries. He was proven to be ethically misleading the public in at-least 2 confirmed scenarios. One was when he worked as a pump attendant at Shell in Aden, Yemen. In those times, Yemen's currency, rial, comprised of coins made of pure silver. Surprisingly the face value of the silver used in these coins was worth more than the currency value of the coin itself. After a while, the Yemen government discovered that there was a sudden drop of the quantity of silver rials in the market. Further investigations pointed out the source to be Mr.Ambani who was actually melting these coins and selling to dealers in London. Ethically, he wasn't breaking any rule but he made lots of money out of it.
Another time, Mr.Ambani went back to India and started playing with the stock market. He used to create these ghost companies offshore from Cuba, et cetera calling them the Crocodile Corporation and so on, and started to buy very huge quantities of stock options of Indian companies. Usually, these options are traded between brokers and they never physically exist. Mr.Ambani took advantage of this loop hole and one day, went to the stock exchange and demanded the physical form of his millions of stock options to be dispatched to him immediately. The stock market was puzzled and didn't know what had to be done. So, they had to shut down the market for three consecutive days. That was the only time the Bombay Stock Market ever close down. Though, Mr.Ambani wasn't breaking any rule, he made the stock market realize its fragility and prepped them for any further such instances.
References :
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20020718/ai_n12642708
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhirubhai_Ambani
1 comment:
HELLO ABIJITH! Upon Deepti's recommendation, I recently watched the Indian firm, Guru (about Ambani). This movie has much relevance to the Italian taxation process. Can unethical behavior be sanctioned when laws fail to protect its mandates?
Guru is a terrific epic movie that shows the deliminas faces by leaders who want to create great organizations and are faced with ethical delimnas that threaten survival. There were many times Ambani resorted to ethical violations but, from a Bentham/ Mills perspective, his actions served a greater good. This seemed to be the driving force in the court decision to drop 19 of the 21charges agaist him. Had they "nailed" him, this company would have been destroyed. Ambani was also helped by a popular revolt against the government for its own unethical practices.
From a Kantian perspective, if we lived in a world that held systems and individuals responsible to natural laws, there would be no need to resort to resort to unethical behaviors.
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