BUSINESS ETHICS

Business Ethics



Business Ethics

Introduction

Insider trading in business is very common, despite the fact that it is very unethical and criminal act most of the business people are engaged in this activity. One of such high profile example of insider case is Martha Stewart. She is one of the business icon engaged in large number of business activities. She started her business career from modelling then after marriage she arranged a business party for her husband and from there she got the idea of starting her own catering business. Her recipes were very appreciated by the guests and this leads her to publish her first cook book. Later she became more and more involved in catering business along with writing of recipe books then sewing and later home décor , she began to utilize all her skills and this leads her towards success. She began to appear in television and radio shows about home décor and other cooking shows, she became a celebrity, author and a business woman.

Along with all these activities she was managing her own home and she had a daughter. This proves her excellent management skills which were then prominent in her large chain business and running of corporation with variety of business fields. Later she became involved in merchandizing and stock trading business. This leads her towards the earning of maximum profit and minimization of losses. For this purpose she became involved in insider trading that attracted all the people around the globe in media and press (Brinkley, 2008; Carpenter, Lacy, & Fico,2008). The main reason for this high profile case is that it involves various moral and ethical issue especially related to business ethics.

Discussion

Case Study

Martha Stewart was involved in the trading business with various business partners one of those is the ImClone that is one of the pharmaceutical companies. Stewart owns large numbers of shares of this company, before the downfall, the company was expected to have losses. After this information there were various people related to this company that begins to perform the investigation but as the time passes by it becomes necessary for the people at the managerial level of ImClone that they should take a proper decision and the most prominent of them was the company CEO. He was close friend of Martha Stewart and he informed Martha about it, at the same time Martha decided to sale her shares and the sudden dumping of shares at such a large number with the profit is itself an evidence of the leak and insider trading.

The whole phenomenon was started after the notification to the ImClone for the new drug which was not approved by the FDA ( Food and Drug Administration). This sudden change was a big threat for the traders, as Imclone has already made extraordinary expenses on this drug it became a great problem for them to sustain their position in the market (Carroll & Buchholtz, 2006, p. 653). Company's CEO takes the advantage of the information and they ...