Thanks for your comment and welcome to my blog.

It’s nice to hear from someone in Broome – I haven’t been there yet, but I’m told that it is a great place to visit. As a fellow Aussie, I will certainly have to come up and visit at some stage.

I can imagine that there might be a fair bit of tension between the desire to maintain the natural beauty of the area and its environment and the interests of mining in the region. I certainly hope that regional planning can be managed in such a way that industry can exploit the region potential of the region from a resources perspective whilst keeping any adverse environmental impact to an absolute minimum.

That said, I can’t imagine that this will be easy.

Whatever happens, I certainly hope that the regional environment can be preserved in spite of the explorative activity.

Lovely to hear from you!

PTTEP could have certainly used the advice of someone with your expertise and experience in their public handling of this case.

I guess the situation confronting PTTEP was especially complex given the possibility of legal action from within three different countries (Australia, East Timor and Indonesia), each with completely different legal systems – any apology issued would obviously have to be appropriately worded to cater for the potential legal action in any of the three countries concerned. I can’t imagine this would be easy, especially given that East Timor is less than ten years old as a country and therefore probably does not have a particularly well developed legal system.

Still, I well crafted lawsuit would certainly have done PTTEP’s reputation a whole lot of good.

Great post on a very important topic that has received far too little attention in the U.S. Brad and Fred are undoubtedly right that the litigators are standing in the way of an apology yet again. Too bad – as the medical profession in the U.S. is teaching the rest of us, a timely and well-crafted apology can actually prevent lawsuits and do a lot to restore trust.

Thank you very kindly for your comment and welcome to my blog.

I agree. Failure to look after the environment will only come back to haunt the human race at some stage.

You raise some interesting questions, which seem to go strike at the core foundations of capitalism, free enterprise and the fundamental purpose of business.

Actually, with regard to your last question I would even venture one step further and venture to say that, for firms of a certain size, society in general should be considered to be a stakeholder.

That said, I am not particularly certain what kind of priority society as a whole should be given compared with other stakeholders. Certainly, in most cases, shareholders and customers should take precedence. But when we are talking about major environmental disasters, surely society as a whole should be given some priority.

(With regard to this case in particular, I should point out that PTTEP did actually undertake considerable effort and expend a lot of money in cleaning the mess up.

My personal complaint does not relate to their efforts in stopping the leak, but rather in addition to stopping the leak, an apology was warranted for the fact that the leak occured in the first place)

It’s pretty mixed up. Businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but at what point do corporations (which are legal persons) actually need to behave as responsible members of a community? As a consumer, I would certainly have a better attitude toward a company that, for once, actually volunteered to clean up a mess it has actually made. Maybe there are companies like that, but, unfortunately, we don’t hear about them.

Actually, that’s a good question. At what point does fiduciary responsibility to stakeholders take a back seat to general responsibility to society?