Reputational laundering - the act of appearing to do
good publicly in order to offset a negative image. A technique usually employed by individuals or corporations who have made their money in a morally questionable
fashion and who
wish to appear to have a moral conscience.
Reputational laundering often comes in the form of Corporate Social Responsibility, where a relatively trivial sum of profits are donated by the corporation to fund socially oriented activities in order to suggest that the corporation is socially responsible.
An example, often sited, would be major
oil companies giving charitable funds to communities in the Nigeria
Delta whose original livelihoods they were implicit in destroying through the extraction of crude
oil.
However the practice of reputational laundering is by no means exclusive to corporations. Many morally bankrupt individuals donate money to charity in order that they are
seen to care about social or environmental
issues. As an added benefit to their undeservedly improved public image they also enjoy significant tax breaks on their donations.
Given that it has
just paid
record fines for insider trading, PJ Gorman’s effort to support a
youth programme in the inner city is little more than reputational laundering.
