“The hardest part is not blowing the whistle;
it is to manage what happens afterwards”.

An anonymous whistleblower

From Terror to professional Death

Within the companies, sanctions which are the most often cited by whistleblowers are the reprimands, isolation, down-grading, humiliation, the public notices, harassment and dismissals. These sanctions do not include the consequences that these schemes will have on the whistleblowers’ health nor on their families. Broken down by the company in which they blew the whistle and / or about which they have disclosed malfunctions, the whistleblowers face the culture of silence and lies.

Indeed, facing the ‘truth teller’ there stands the culture of lies. The former French Minister of the Budget JérômeCahuzac who had announced he was fighting tax evasion even denied his own offshore Swiss bank accounts before finally backpedaling and admitting the fraud he had committed. Bill Clinton, then President of the United States of America, had denied the personal relationship he had with his young intern Monica Lewinski, before confessing to the contrary. The racing cyclist LanceArmstrong denied drug doping before recognizing the acts. The denial of the powerful is such that “the one who says the truth must be executed”, as Guy Béart used to sing.

At UBS, as in other companies or administrations, whistleblowers don’t denounce the employees who do their job properly – and who, in their vast majority, ignore the malfunctions and wrongdoings. However in the ‘UBS story’, the colleagues who were staying on my side surprisingly changed their minds when writing emails to the management in which they supported them, exactly the opposite of what they had testified to several months before. Can one then be astonished if, a decade later, these employees are still staff members and still always in employment?

Once made redundant, the whistleblower faces another heavy consequence: his ‘unemployability’. Having been ‘unemployable’ for nine years because I blew the whistle on illegal practices and important malfunctions within UBS, I wonder whether on the contrary, I could be hired after an indictment and having been taken into custody for complicity of the malfunctions put in place by my former employer. The answer is most probably positive because my ex-UBS colleagues indicted for the same reason still work for the bank in France or work competitively in the financial industry. Must one be the accomplice –or guilty – to be like other employees, in a ‘non ethical’ normality?

If not a single company wishes to hire whistleblowers whereas other companies hire executives who have been indicted, does this mean that confidential agreements between the managements of companies exist in order to protect the ones having a ‘non ethical’ behaviour whatever their job, whatever their skills are? Do the other companies act in solidarity with the one that has been denounced? Do they fear reprisals? Is the company worried about hiring someone who would potentially blow the whistle on another case? Would the business world agree to condemn whistleblowers to a social death?

On the contrary, ‘confidential’ agreements would also exist between companies in order to hire employees who would pose a problem. That would permit them to be held on a leash. As with the bank Crédit Suisse, the press informed us that in the spring of 2017, a judicial inquiry would be opened for aggravated money laundering and tax evasion. Crédit Suisse has been the only employer willing to hire me right after I was dismissed by UBS. How would have been my credibility? Would I then be considered as a whistleblower in terms of tax evasion if I had accepted a job offered by UBS’s main Swiss competitor? One does not divorce the devil to marry its cousin!

Over and above the injustices one faces in recruitment and employment that already exist at work, secrecy allows questions of any type to be hidden. In business just as in a family one finds ‘family secrecy’. The ones who know the truth keep their mouth shut in order to protect their career. Bank secrecy is a concrete example. One of my former UBS colleagues explained to me that ‘the little green men - the founder President of UBS France used to name the UBS AG (Swiss) bankers “the little green men” - have the habit of being on familiar terms with the large part of their clientele and this was truly surprising for him because he had never seen this practice in the profession he had been in for more than twenty years. Several years later, he confessed to me to have understood that “Secrecy binds them. Each of the parties supports each other exactly as if they had hidden a corpse together”. Whilst journalists, associations, students and the investigators have no problem to contact whistleblowers, it seems that head hunters and companies are unable to approach these collaborators who not only are skilled but who have also proven that they have acted with honesty and responsibility.

Harassed, discredited, stigmatized and dismissed… Facing the sadism of what one calls the ‘system’, one dares repeating endlessly that the French employment law is the one that offers the best protection in the world!

However, it appears that the transparency we all together advocate for seems to have consequences on multinational companies. An important number of company managers have been made redundant or dismissed over the past years for their fault as far as ethics is concerned, namely in the domain of corruption, of crimes initiated or even harassment. On May 15^th, 2017 France Info informed us about a survey that had been published two days before by the auditor PwC. On an international scale amongst the 2,500 companies quoted on the Stock Exchange, the number of departures of managers for the breach of ethical standards increased by 36 % over the past five years. The beginning of 2021 acknowledges that the trend continues with South Korea announcing the sentence of the Samsung Vice-Chairman for corruption.

The pharmaceutical Industry