Company boards can't act as judge, jury and defendant says co-founder of Infosys
Narayana Murthy has shared his views on whistle blowing by employees and has observed that it should not be an act of vendetta to harass the company bosses. He further expressed that company boards should not be the sole judge of a whistleblower complaint.
He further added that in most of the cases, if the whistleblower complaint is against a middle or low-level employee, then an internal committee consisting of senior employees investigate the claims. However, when a complaint is lodged against a senior employee, the tendency of the Board is to judge the complaint themselves which is not actually good.
In Infosys, the whistleblower questioned the corporate governance norms in the company and accused co-founder Nandan Nilekani to hide all the wrong doings of the Board in 2018. In 2019 also, the charges were levelled against the company’s CEO and CFO for accounting irregularities. In this respect, Infosys released a detailed report highlighting the audit committee’s investigation done along with the assistance of independent legal counsel Shardul Amardas Mangaldas & Co and PricewaterhouseCoopers which gave a clean chit to Infosys.
