Does the notion of ethical responsibility fit into share ownership? There’s certainly lots of talk about it. Annual reports produced by JSE-listed companies devote pages to accounts of how seriously they take corporate social responsibility. A company’s impact on employees, the environment, the community and the broader economy is scrutinised. Everything imaginable is measured.But what if it’s a case of rubbish in — rubbish out? Or if, more subtly, the full story isn’t being told? A few years ago researchers at Bench Marks Foundation, an NGO with limited resources, did something unthinkable. It interrogated nine years of Lonmin’s social investment reports. Bench Marks established that while Lonmin told a story every year about how it was building housing for its employees, the truth was that for most of those years nothing was actually built — the story was just retold every year. Bench Marks’ exercise was prompted by a suspicion that something was not right with Lonmin’s housing ta...

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