Corporate Responsibility and Risk Management – The Tsamota ESG Tool

Tsamota Ltd draws upon a cadre of highly-skilled practitioners with decades of experience in the

developed as well as developing world secured at international courts and tribunals, the United Nations Security Council, military, policing and intelligence organisations, and civil society. The Tsamota team has recently added to its expert pool a number of specialists in the field of natural resource-extraction governance. This initiative has been taken with the intention of offering the resource-extraction industry a suite of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and risk-mitigation services, including an environmental, social and governance (ESG) field-monitoring mechanism which has been designed for application in conflict, post-conflict and other challenging extractive environments.

The Tsamota ESG-monitoring tool is, for all intents and purposes, a bespoke compliance instrument tailored to meet the reputational as well as operational needs arising from the extractive activities of a given client. In particular, Tsamota project teams assess the social, environmental and governance-related requirements – both legal and ethical – with which an extractive-industry actor is expected to comply by commercial partners, State actors and civil society. In turn, the said requirements serve as the basis for amendments to Tsamota’s ESG template, which is modelled closely upon the sort of qualitative measuring instrument that is quickly emerging as the preferred tool by which national and international authorities, as well as civil-societal actors, assess corporate performance in areas that are not strictly associated with calculations of profit and loss. Here, we would hasten to add that Tsamota understands clearly the oftentimes strong nexus which exists between investor confidence and the reputation for ethical conduct – deserved or otherwise – of a publicly-traded firm.

Tsamota takes a phased approach to the provision of client services to resource-industry clientele. As a first step, the designated project team identifies, alongside the client, all relevant legal, physical and reputational risks facing the client. Where the client prefers, this assessment can be extended to an examination of the links, such as they may be, between a given risk and investor confidence. Secondly, a monitoring mechanism is drawn up, the purpose of which is to alert Tsamota and the management of the resource-extraction firm to impending as well as actual threats to its reputation and, or in the alternative, the reputation of the client firm. As a third step, Tsamota deploys the said monitoring mechanism along with a suite of controls designed to guide the relevant personnel, including lessons-learned protocols. Specialised training can be provided, as required.

More detailed information, including a cost- and obligation-free assessment of the needs of your firm, is available upon request. To this end, please contact Ms Relinde Van Laar, the relevant project manager, through VanLaar@tsamota.com.