Business Ethics: Dubai Ethics Authority

Overview

The major aim of the Dubai Ethics Authority is to identify, analyze, interpret, and advice on ethical and legal issues faced by business communities. Business managers or owners routinely encounter problems in their daily activities. These problems cut across moral and legal matters. Among the ethical challenges met, they include laying off employees, company dressing codes, work reporting time, employees recruitment process, business expansion, privatizing an entity. The legal matters that present difficulties during business management are the legality or the illegality of the decisions made by managers. Dubai Ethics Authority is serious in its work to ensure all business entities adhere to the rules and regulations governing business operations in the country. It will endeavor to ensure that moral codes and standards are observed. The Authority is a legally formed entity that has complied with all the statutory and regulatory requirements as per the laws of Dubai.

The Dubai Ethics Authority will:

1. Provide legal advice regarding the privatization of business units.

2. Give directions on how firms or business entities may carry out the retrenchment and mass lay-off of workers and how to go about their benefits.

3. Define all ethical considerations that directly or indirectly affect business stakeholders and workers.

4. Conduct its business as a non-profit semi-autonomous government agency.

Policy Statement

Policy statement regards grant of permission to business entities or business persons in order to carry out business-related activities that generate profits. The team is concerned with the protection of individuals involved in business operations. Furthermore, buyers now regard protection and anti-exploitation laws applying to everyone doing business as a part of their economic activity in generating income or earning a living. It is now important that the company constitute an audible and responsible management to protect itself, business owners, and business entity employees.

Business operations come with a substantial amount of ethical and legal issues that directly affect operators, owners, and customers alike. The Dubai Ethical Authority is an agency that considers such issues with their magnitude and ensures that every player in this sector behaves in a professional manner.

The authority has identified that compliance with ethical and legal set standards are necessary requirements for the fulfillment of the Dubai Ethical Authority functions. This business ethics handbook shall be agreed by the government, and the authority members define processes, rules, and regulations that the Dubai Ethics Authority and the business operators will adhere to and follow.

The handbook sets out moral standards that business operators must observe when carrying out their day-to-day activities with regard to employee treatment and their conduct within the firms. Failure to do as stipulated in this handbook will lead the authority to viewing the act as a disciplinary issue.

The parties involved should not misunderstand policies related to the ethics and legal matters that are specified under business operations and standard codes as it may be applied by other sector players.

Please ensure that you thoroughly go over the handbook, adhere to the requirements, and enjoy the benefits due to organized business operations that observe ethics and moral standards.

Dubai Ethics Authority Code of Business Ethics

The Dubai Ethics Authority, or hereby referred to as the authority including its entities, affiliates, and subsidiaries, is focused on creating and maintaining the highest degree of public confidence and trust. The authority understands that its reputation balances on the adherence to the highest level of professionalism and high standards of ethics by employees, officers, and directors.

The code of business outlines the common standards set for the authority, its employees, officers, and directors. It is made to uphold the principles and values it symbolizes and deter malpractices. The code is essential to the extent that it ensures all the players including the public ones are aware of the authority’s set standards. Every member of the board is responsible for the compliance with the same, and failure to observe its provisions may result into disciplinary action that may be in the form of referral to the appropriate government department or dismissal.

The Authority’s Management Team and Its Responsibilities

The provision of the management team and its responsibilities is crucial in order to ensure that the authority’s course of action is guided, controlled, and directed by the mandated officers in charge. It is designed to ensure efficiency and the fact that the Dubai Ethics Authority achieves its mission and delivers it to the public.

The Chief Executive Officer

He/she will be an officer in charge of directing the authority’s operations and providing strategic guidance to the board for the organization’s achieving missions and objectives. He/she will establish functional and efficient channels of communication with other stakeholders, government agencies, local authority’s, and other vital decision makers in order to ensure that the board is delivering high-quality services as anticipated by the public and business community.

Initial Committee

The initial committee will create and execute plans for funding; it will also initiate and monitor board development within the authority. The group will generate and dissolve by-laws when necessary.

Coordinating Council

The council will develop strategies that directly respond to the inputs from committees or individuals through organizing large and broad objectives.

Action Committees

The action committee will bring specific changes in policies, practices, and programs to the department where their work is defined. It will review all corporation by-laws formed by the respective committee and forward recommendations to the chief executive officer for ratification.

The purpose of this document is to provide guidance and essential rules for the authority’s officers in their conduct within the management and their interaction with public members and offer directions to the business entities’ owners and operators with regard to observing ethical and moral values.

Governing Laws and Regulations

The Dubai Ethics Authority objective is to provide its clients with the highest standard of customer service and values through guidance and provision of advice on avoiding malpractices found in business. Such advice includes the conduct of senior managers to their juniors as far as respect and harassment of any form, either sexual or tribal-related, is concerned. The authority will put regulatory and legal complaints above anything. It will also ensure that all its actions are in compliance with the applicable policies and laws.

Core Ethical Values

Integrity

The authority considers integrity among its employees a paramount issue. It recognizes the fact that public confidence and trust is built on its reputation and integrity. The council will respect the clients’ interests, honor the commitments, and promise to act only in areas where he/she can work with a certain quality.

Every entity involved in acts of business must observe that its conducts are accepted and do not breach integrity. Non-compliance with integrity issues is deemed punishable by the authority. The Dubai Ethics Authority will always endeavor to ensure that the company operators comply with the provisions of integrity standards. It will use proper mechanisms to monitor the decisions and acts of business decision makers.

Honesty

The Dubai Ethics Authority must serve its clients in a direct and transparent fashion. All the communication emanating from the management should follow proper channel and should not mislead any stakeholder. The authority undertakes all possible efforts to see that the customers’ promotional materials and communications are straightforward. The complete and accurate decisions are prompted by intelligent conduct.

There is a legal duty of both business entity management and employees to observe honesty in their dealing with customers. Issues or complaints regarding sincerity must not arise, and when they do, the authority considers it punishable and is instituting a proper punitive measure to the concerned. The players in the business sector must recognize that accurate information is a requirement for a good decision. Any business firm must inform the authority in the event when it feels a customer is behaving in a dishonest manner for instituting proper measures.

Fairness

The authority is committed to treating all its clients and partners fairly in the same manner it would expect from others. This approach applies in a non-discriminatory and consistent style. In the same way, business operators have moral and legal responsibilities to ensure that the firm upholds morals of fairness. Any employee who is found to have breached this standard must face disciplinary actions from the authority. Everyone should ensure that all business transactions meet the standards of fairness.

The business entities must not take advantages through unethical practices. They will strive to deal with their colleagues, competitors, clients, and service providers fairly. The Dubai Ethics Authority opposes taking unjust advantage through material facts misrepresentation, misuse of privileged information, concealment, manipulation, or any unfair conduct.

Responsibility

The authority has a moral duty to live up to its commitment and responsibilities held towards the employees, government authorities, clients, regulators, society, and media. It is committed to providing its services to business communities in an innovative and efficient style consistent with their demands and creating an environment that is suitable and reliable in conducting business. This will be achieved without interference with the guiding principles of individual firms as long as ethics, laws, and regulations are observed.

The Dubai Ethics Authority will not allow any player in business sector to fail in committing to acceptable business practices and competing in providing high-quality products and services.

Core Professional Values

Regulatory Compliance

The Dubai Ethics Authority will recognize the significance of applicable standards, policies, laws, and regulations. It complies with all the latter regardless of their either internal or external origins. The authority is committed to strict management discipline and meets a compliance environment that reaches first class standards. In its mandate as a regulatory body to business entity operators, the authority will stand firm with regard to regulatory compliance. The entities that cannot observe the provisions will be subjected to disciplinary actions.

Communication and Reporting

This policy applies to all communication made by government authority, regulators, security exchange, and the employees. All the parties: directors, officers and workers involved in the process of disclosure are responsible for furthering this directive. You need to get conversant with the requirements of disclosure. Individuals are prohibited from omitting and misrepresenting facts or causing others to do so. Those charged with supervisory role must deliver their services with due diligence.

Confidentiality

The employees must observe and maintain tools for monitoring and controlling how sensitive and classified information is transferred within and outside the firm. Nonpublic information must not be divulged to the public in terms of trade. The Dubai Ethics Authority will observe the principle of confidentiality in its dealing within the base, and it must endeavor to ensure that all business sector players adhere to the set rules and regulations regarding confidentiality.

Insider Trading

All employees, directors, and officers are not allowed by the law to:

• Buy or sell any forms of security while possessing any information or material considered non-public.

• Buy or sell securities from other companies while possessing any not publicly declared information or material obtained as a result of relationship with the management or employment.

• Reveal any nonpublic information to anyone: a friend, relative, cohabit, or spouse who goes ahead to use such information in order to gain an unfair advantage for other investors or bidders.

• Participate in day trading securities or any short-time investment in the firm.

• Buy or sell calls, options, puts, or any firm derivative securities for hedging purposes.

Due diligence

The Dubai Ethics Authority will operate in due diligence so that it gets to know and understand its clients better and transact its business in accordance with the applicable regulations, rules, laws, and policies. Business firms must adopt an identification program for their customers in a move to knowing them. This will facilitate better understanding resulting to high-quality service delivery. The authority has a legal responsibility to ensure that business community act complying with these standards. Any company that conducts its transactions with any contravention of these policies will be liable to disciplinary measures.