Sustainable development

Women attend a cooking class as part of a community project in Peru

Anglo American is committed to operating with strong ethical principles.

We expect employees to take personal responsibility for ensuring that their conduct complies with these principles and encourage all stakeholders to raise concerns about potential breaches or any other legal or ethical issues with management.

We also promote our standards with organisations we work with, and it’s important to us that their principles and values are aligned to ours.

SpeakUp

SpeakUp is an independent whistle-blowing facility for internal and external Anglo American stakeholders to report unethical or unsafe business practices anonymously. These might include bribery and corruption, breaches of safety and health standards, theft, discrimination, damage to the environment, and improper accounting practices.

The companies in each country that provide the SpeakUp service are contractually required to protect the anonymity of people making reports and will not request identity details. Reports submitted are received at the contact centre of the service provider and edited to protect the originator prior to being passed on to nominated people at the relevant business units. During 2011, we received 299 alerts (2010: 313). Each alert was evaluated and, where appropriate, investigated.

As independent monitoring is an important contributor to the success of such a programme, a process has been put in place to report activity on SpeakUp to the business unit and Group audit committees.