DBS Goes Pink?

DBS Goes Pink?

Development Bank of Singapore’s (DBS) record of public relations disasters is the stuff of legends. It ranges from CEO Phillippe Paillart’s fake MBA, safe deposit boxes dumped in Hongkong, botched hostile takeover of a local bank, to the recent Thursday 9 April press release that CEO Richard Stanley was ready to return to work (and his subsequent demise on a Saturday morning).

And now the bank, fresh from a bruising over selling Lehman tainted products, is diving head first into the internal brawl of a women’s advocacy group.

Specifically, DBS accused Josie Lau, appointed president of AWARE, of “knowingly disregarded” it’s staff code of conduct twice. Ms Lau did inform the bank when she was appointed to the AWARE executive committee (for which she sought and obtained the bank’s support), and when she set her sights for the president position. DBS took exception to the latter and claimed “we could not support her intent to run for president, given the demands associated with the top post of a leading advocacy group in Singapore.” With the agenda of the new AWARE committee yet to be settled, nobody really knows how busy she will be. But DBS Holdings chairman Koh Boon Hwee is executive director of MediaRing and sits on the boards of Sunningdale, NTU Board of Trustees, Temasek Holdings, Agilent Technologies and Hewlett Foundation. He even took over the daily running of Singapore’s largest commercial bank when Stanley was on medical leave. Is multi-tasking restricted only to male executives in the Singapore private sector? (Some politicians already confessed they can’t handle more than two opposition members in parliament)

DBS took a PR hit a again last year when it chose Focus on the Family as the beneficiary of a charity drive, a group associated with a conservative Christian stand against abortion and homosexuality. Ms Lau’s scapegoat division happened to be assigned the role of recommending a charity for DBS to support. The jury is still out on the hidden agenda of the new AWARE, but DBS’s corporate logo may just shift from bright red to a shade of pink. After all, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong did tell Time magazine in 2003, “In the past, if we know you’re gay, we would not employ you. But we just changed this quietly.”

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