Open Source Content Management

Latin American competition authorities refuse to be shaken by the covid-19 pandemic and are stepping up their scrutiny of the region’s fast-growing e-commerce and digital banking sectors, said speakers at a Latin Lawyer webinar earlier this week.

Alongside China, Germany is still considered to be the world’s leading exporting nation. Made in Germany has long been an indication of superior quality and standards. The great reputation of German products extends to the import of raw materials, finished goods, components and subcomponents around the world. However, it is clear that human rights and environmental protection standards may not be uniformly met by all international companies in such extensive and complex supply chains.

Recent decades have featured unprecedented growth and change across industries and the economy. New ways to do and fund business are rising with ever-greater speed thanks to globalization and new technologies. Hand in hand with these recent developments, awareness and concern about the side effects that both companies’ and consumers’ actions have on a global scale have increased, stressing newly found concerns for the well-being of both society at large and the environment.

Introduction

The Paris Agreement on Climate Change adopted in 2015 gave new impetus to the growing interest of the public agenda to ensure environmental and human rights protection, and intensified the discussion on corporate social responsibility in achieving this goal.

In September 2016, Mexico ratified the Paris Agreement, thus committing to reducing by 2030 its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 22% compared to its baseline. Even though the Mexican government is mainly in charge of achieving this goal, this is not possible without the active participation of the business sector, as this latter is the responsible for the majority of GHG emissions in Mexico.

Corruption represents a global systemic problem. The Mexican Supreme Court of Justice (SCJ) has formally recognized that an organized civil society has a mitigating and reductive effect on corruption, hence, it is fundamental for the new regulatory anticorruption structure in the country. Corruption substantially affects the provision of public services, economic growth, human rights, and the rule of law. This harmful phenomenon, that has often been defined as “the abuse of public power for private benefit”, is present in both the public and the private industry, frequently, in the corporate sector.

More than a year has gone by since Mexico, like the rest of the world, became immersed in the ravages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The productive sectors of our country sought, by various means, to adapt production and distribution to provide services in light of a virus that required us to stay home and reduce social contact to a minimum.

ESG initiatives arise from the increasing awareness of the largest and most complex economic, environmental, and social challenges that we are facing at a global scale. The United Nations 2030 Agenda and related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts; reaching the sustainable use and conservation of marine life, agriculture, and natural resources; ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy, and, in general, ensuring sustainable production and consumption patterns.

Introduction

Gradually, the words expressed by the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics, Milton Friedman, that “there is one and only one social responsibility for business: to use its resources and engage in activities designated to increase its profits…” have less resonance among organizations. This is because, contrary to that quote and almost 50 years later, the World Economic Forum published the Davos Manifesto 2020, which states that “a company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental and social objectives”.

A trend has grown during the past few years in investors from the international financial sector, ranging from big investment funds and institutional investors to individual investors (retail investors). This trend is to invest not only in companies that have stable and competitive finances, but also in those that fulfill criteria of sustainable and responsible operations. These aspects have been focused mainly on three big matters: the Environmental, the Social and the Governance (ESG as an acronym). Thus, the investors choose companies that are considered as pillars of the ESG because these serve to value their legal, regulatory and reputational risk.