Man Group plc - Corporate Responsibility Report 2007

However good or competitive our products and services, if our integrity ever came into question, the trust of our stakeholders and thus the sustainability of our business could be impaired. Indeed, given the extent to which we are vulnerable to others’ actions, it is crucial that we not only behave with absolute integrity but that we are seen to do so. Our stakeholders’ perceptions can easily be influenced by events in our sector or the broader market. We believe this validates our commitment to total transparency in the ways we inform stakeholders about our business and the values that underpin it.

For Man Group, corporate responsibility is rooted in hard data that is essential to the sustainability and future success of our business. It is not a question of simply ‘ticking the box’; it is about protecting our reputation by systematically identifying, quantifying, managing and mitigating non-financial risks.

It goes beyond our interactions and relationships with our customers, investors and distributors. We are a significant player in the global financial services market. How we behave unquestionably influences how others feel companies like ours ought to behave. We take that responsibility seriously, and believe we have an obligation mutually to share best corporate responsibility practice with our peers.

Our relationships with organisations like Business in the Community, FTSE4Good, the Institute of Business Ethics and the United Nations Global Compact help engender a wider awareness of and an enthusiasm for corporate responsibility practices and disciplines.

We are proactive in our efforts to engage our peers in the corporate responsibility debate, publishing details of our programme and inviting them to our company workshops on, for example, Carbon Reduction, Quit Smoking and Employee Safety. This enables us to share first hand the ways we are embedding our Corporate Responsibility Programme, and share ideas they may feel have potential application to their own organisations.

This is reflected in our ranking second out of ten in our sector for Europe and fifth out of fifty for the United Kingdom in the Department of Trade & Industry’s Value Added Scorecard which surveys the Top 800 UK and 750 European Companies.

Corporate responsibility is gaining further impetus from central government in the shape, for example, of the Financial Services Authority Principles for Business and the Turnbull Guidance. In addition, the Companies Act 1985 and the new Companies Act 2006 with its Business Review requirements which require directors to report on material business risks, including employee and environmental matters – two key constituents of our programme.

In last year’s report we described in some detail each of the elements traditionally considered core to corporate responsibility. This year we have shifted focus slightly, concentrating – both in prioritising our activities and in determining the information provided to stakeholders – on areas of particular relevance given the nature and scale of our global business, i.e.:

• Our people
• Our marketplace
• Our communities
• The environment

While adopting these as priorities, however, we will nevertheless report on our performance in the broader ‘traditional’ corporate responsibility elements, as outlined last year.

This year we have published a series of Supplements to our Corporate Responsibility Report, the purpose of which is to provide further information in three distinct areas: Our People, Community and the Environment

These Supplements describe in greater detail these key corporate responsibility areas and provide further data and analysis with a far greater degree of granularity than is possible in our Corporate Responsibility Report.

These documents are also available on our website at www.mangroupplc.com.

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