8th August 2018

To our employees, customers, and stakeholders:

I am immensely proud to confirm that SAMGarde, and all our associated group companies, is reaffirming its continued support of the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of Human Rights, Labour, Environment and Anti-Corruption.

As a company, we recognise the importance of not only operating profitably but also by being good corporate citizens in all the markets & territories where we operate. Being a global business aligning ourselves to The UN Global Compact was the obvious way to ensure getting close to other likeminded global organisations but also, importantly, to open ourselves up to be held to account by The UN itself.

Designing & delivering governance is a large part of what we do for our customers and our success is built on showing organisations how strong policies and procedures drive significant business benefit, it is therefore logical that we use policy & process to ensure our compliance with the Ten Principles. We also believe that these issues, Human Rights, Labour, Environment & Anti-Corruption are so critical, at this particular point in history that no company or individual can say “This does not apply to us”, that we also commit to actively publicise and promote the importance of the Ten Principles of The UN Global Compact to our employees, customers, and stakeholders.

In this annual Communique on Progress, we describe the actions we are taking to continually improve the integration of the Global Compact and its principles into our business strategy, culture and daily operations. We also commit to share this information with our stakeholders using our primary channels of communication.

For each area, Labour, Human Rights, Environment & Anti-Corruption we have made significant progress this year on the Operational side of governance, but as any of our customers know we insist on both Corporate Governance and Quality Assurance to be implemented so that we can validate that what we intend and expect is actually occurring additionally that our managers & board are continually updated and obligated to act in cases of deficiency. Therefore we will undertake this year to focus on designing measures and controls to allow us to quantify success.

To oversee this work our Governance Director has had her mandate expanded and the board have appointed a Director of CSR & Philanthropy. Anybody wishing to know more about any aspect of our programme can contact csr@samgarde.com.

Yours faithfully,

Professor Andrew Harcourt
Managing Director, SAMGarde

As our Managing Director stated in the communique governance is a large part of what we do as a company, and this has been an area of significant investment. In the last year, we have put in place a number of new policies that support our commitment to The UN Global Compact the most important of which is a new policy on Ethical Trading, forbidding us from doing business with any company which does not respect basic human rights, and what we believe to be upstanding moral and ethical behaviour.

Focusing on our Labour commitment our Employment policy now actively forces us to promote the equal rights of equality for ALL, a clear example of this was the harmonisation of terms & conditions between our UK & Portuguese staff. We sat down with the employment legislation of both countries and in each subject area whichever was the most generous was the one that became policy, yes this has cost us some points in margin but it ensures our staff know they are ALL valued equally for the contribution they bring to our business.

Our Environmental and CSR policy urges all our employees to be mindful of the waste they are producing. We utilise remote / home working where possible to limit our carbon footprint and to ensure our staff have the right work / life balance. Staff are encouraged to reuse packaging where they can, and we are striving to operate a truly paperless office overall.

We take bribery and corruption very seriously at SAMGarde, with a zero-tolerance policy which we publish to all of our new business partners and every third-party we contract with.
Any employees who come across examples of bribery, or who are approached with bribes, have our utmost protection and support in bringing these cases to light, and seeing that they are dealt with appropriately.

Where there are any concerns amongst our workforce we have a clear disclosure policy that encourages staff to speak up when they see areas of concern. To underline our commitment here we subscribe to & publicise internally Public Concern At Work’s external confidential Whistleblowing service.