The South Pacific Stock Exchange (SPX) and Reserve Bank
of Fiji (RBF) ‘knowingly jeopardised the protection of
female employees’ after Sun Insurance engaged a senior
executive who was recently convicted of sex
offences.
The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) is
deeply concerned that leading SPX-listed company Sun
Insurance failed to respond to multiple queries sent on
e-mail from significant shareholders expressing their strong
concern about the hiring of Mohammad Nouzab Fareed,
convicted last week and now on remand for two counts of
indecent assaults.
After the company’s failure
to respond directly to shareholder concerns, FWRM has
confirmed the Fareed matter was also reported in writing to
both the SPX and RBF with no apparent
response.
The facts surrounding Fareed’s
conviction last week have now been widely reported in the
media.
When Sun Insurance made the decision to hire
Fareed, FWRM acknowledges, he had the benefit of being
presumed innocent until a court passed
judgement.
However, Fareed was already convicted for
indecent assault in December 2021 ([FJMC 41, Criminal Case
174/2] when the company hired him as the Chief
Transformation Consultant.
Fareed was sentenced to 14
months’ imprisonment suspended for two years by then-chief
magistrate Usaia Ratuvili in a widely publicised case within
the business community as he resigned from his previous
position as Chief Executive Officer of Fijian Holdings Ltd
in December 2019.
Fareed’s conviction was quashed by
then-High Court judge Salesi Temo in 2022.
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“The
silence, lack of curiousity and foot-shuffling of SPX and
RBF, whose primary responsibilities include market
regulation, is astonishing,” said FWRM Executive Director
Nalini Singh.
“It is disturbing that the RBF did not
even apply its own “fit and proper” fitness test policy
to the hiring of employees,” she added.
FWRM
believes that the SPX and RBF’s lack of focus and urgency
addressing multiple written shareholder warnings about a sex
offender has clearly jeopardised the protection that the
female employees at Sun Insurance should have as a matter of
right.
“Sexual violence and indecent assaults are
dynamics built around the power imbalance between predator
and prey. That the SPX and RBF appear to have seen nothing
of concern, despite written warnings, in the power dynamic
between this executive officer and the female staff he led
is beyond belief,” said Singh.
“When regulatory
protections and barriers repeatedly fail to respond, the
system itself must be reformed. We need to pull out the
rubbish and make sure the prevention of sexual violence
overrides anything else the SPX and RBF have convinced
themselves might be a more pressing consideration in how
they regulate our capital markets.”
“It is
terrifying to think that other listed companies may be
considering that Sun Insurance sets a precedent for other
sex or non-sex convictions or behaviour patterns to be
hidden from public sight and put beyond the reach of
regulators,” she warned.
FWRM calls for the adoption
of a compulsory zero tolerance policy to Sexual Exploitation
Abuse and Harassment (SEAH) by all companies publicly
listed, and offers training for the leadership of these
companies.
Training must start from the top, at the
highest levels of
leadership.
