BLOG: It is not about the choice between slave-free chocolate or not
by Bas Lans
Today we read back a passage from a interview with Paul Polman, chairman of Unilever, in NRC of March 4, 2017: According to Paul Polman, the right to exist of companies is: to make a positive contribution to society. And therefore not primarily lining the pockets of the shareholders.
It was quite a statement that Polman made then: the interests of shareholders do not come first at Unilever. However, on Friday the company announced that the plan to make Rotterdam exclusively its global headquarters has been scrapped; an opportunity to re-examine the 2017 ruling.
In recent years, Polman and Unilever have been the epitome of socially responsible business operations for most Dutch people. If you thought of a green CEO, you thought of Polman. He received awards and honorary doctorates for this, in the Netherlands and abroad. Even if you thought of a real Dutch multinational that valued Dutch social interests, you quickly thought of Unilever. The company was so Dutch that even the Prime Minister became closely involved in the efforts to keep Unilever out of the hands of Kraft Heinz in 2017.
A multinational like Unilever understandably has many – often conflicting – interests: financial, social and of course the interests of shareholders. Unilever's reputation, partly built on statements by Polman such as against NRC, suggested that the company managed to keep these interests in balance very well. Many Dutch people put Polman and with him Unilever on a pedestal. A white swan.
However, it now appears - after it became known that the company will not establish its head office exclusively in Rotterdam - that Unilever is just an average company. It must yield to the will of shareholders and subordinate other interests to it.
The role that Unilever played behind the scenes in the abolition of dividend tax also seems more shadowy than we expected. After Polman announced on Friday that the head office will not be located exclusively in the Netherlands, the cabinet announced through Rutte that the abolition of dividend tax is being reexamined. Although the link between dividend tax and the exclusive location of Unilever's global headquarters in the Netherlands has always been denied, this link appears to exist. Polman appears to have lobbied heavily for the unpopular abolition, but he has not managed to get the shareholders on the same page now that the time has almost come.
We cannot take Polman's reading seriously that the great resistance to the dividend plans has deterred shareholders. Unilever cannot hide behind the will of those shareholders. It has focused on a dividend deal that would have a significant impact on Dutch taxpayers and now that that deal is not considered good enough, shareholder interests take precedence. The balance between the different interests is gone.
If it had been possible, I would have liked to ask Polman personally today what happened. Has he simply promised too much to NRC, or has something actually changed at Unilever? Is he as disappointed as we are, or have we been too optimistic about him all these years?
