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British Chamber searches for board

Leadership vacuum follows dispute over conflict of interest

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 31st, 2007 issue

The British Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic is in disarray after charges that the president had a conflict of interest caused the entire board to either resign or be dismissed.
The chamber, founded to represent British business interests in the country, first saw the resignation of its president, Jo Weaver, earlier this month, along with Mike al-Nassir and Andrew Sutherland, the chamber’s vice president and treasurer.
Following the resignations, the chamber’s members voted 72-63 to oust the five remaining board members at a contentious special meeting Oct. 24. About 330 firms in total belong to the chamber.
The ousted board members confronted Weaver because of what they said was a conflict of interest, according to Miroslav Sédlak, one of the ousted board members. Weaver’s public relations and event management company, JWA Prague, had been under contract to work with the chamber.
While there was no apparent misuse of funds, such conflicts of interest “always damage the reputation of an organization,” Sédlak said at the meeting.
“Nothing happened, there was no major scandal, we’re not cleaning up the household,” Sédlak said. He later said GE Money Bank, where he leads governmental relations for Central and Eastern Europe, had terminated its chamber membership.
Weaver said she did everything by the book when she served at the chamber.
“I abstained from every vote relating to the agency, and the fact that I was the chairman of the chamber added value to what I was doing,” Weaver said Oct. 30.
Weaver’s company had a contract to receive 50,000 Kč ($2,646) per month from the chamber for event management and public relations services from 2005 to 2007, Sédlak said. In all, her company received 2.5 million Kč in that period, including additional billings.
The chamber’s five paid staff members have said they will also resign in light of how little concern chamber members showed for Weaver’s conflict of interest.
“[The members] said they didn’t really care about this,” said Renata Vildomcová, the chamber’s executive director. The staff has lost all its motivation to work for the chamber now, she said.
Before the staff resigns, it will schedule a meeting Dec. 3 to hold a vote for a new board, Vildomcová said.
“The chamber is desperately missing some guidance and some proper rules,” she said. “We need some written directives for the members of the board. The [governing] articles are not enough, so it’s important that the new board works on this.”
Other members of the British Chamber who attended the Oct. 24 meeting expressed disappointment with the way the dispute was handled. Many declined to talk publicly about the issue.  
“It’s obvious the board didn’t get on, and they weren’t able to resolve it behind closed doors,” said Irena Brichta, owner of Brichta and Partners, an executive search firm in Prague. “In my view, if they couldn’t work together, why should I have confidence in the [board members] who allowed it to get to this stage?”
Neil McCluskey, an architect at Lewis and Hickey Ltd. in Prague, also a chamber member, agreed, saying the board should have been able to work out the problems on its own.
“My feeling is they didn’t handle it very well within the group,” he said. “They could have sorted it out.”

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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