Economic forum tackles subject of morality

Is Warren Buffett going to hell?

That's just one of the burning questions that await a cluster of global leaders, including former United States President Bill Clinton, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Goldman Sachs president Lloyd Blankfein and Harvard University president Lawrence Summers when they huddle in the Swiss Alps today for the World Economic Forum.

It is shaping up to be one hell of a week in Davos, where the attendees, including 23 theologians and 15 heads of state, kick off the 35th annual talkfest with an opening-night supper panel that confronts the issue of "Today's Sinners and the Seven Deadly Sins".

The topic will be discussed at other seminars and official forum gatherings throughout the five-day conference.

"Gluttony, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride," explains sin seminar organiser Vanessa Edwards, naming the seven deadly sins enumerated by St Gregory the Great in the sixth century.

Fifteen centuries later, the folk who run the forum reckon St Gregory's list, popularised by Italian poet Dante in The Divine Comedy, is not quite up to the task of explaining modern behaviour.

"We want to find out what is the eighth deadly sin of our time," Edwards says.

Of course, coming up with a new "deadly sin" - and a historically sound penalty for breaking it - is bound to cause some gulps among the global leaders. Back in St Gregory's day, when crime and punishment were a function of fire and brimstone, the consequences of a guilty verdict were not very pleasant.

As Dante put it, the dark angel Beelzebub retained the power to prosecute businessmen such as Buffett on charges of gluttony. And had Beelzebub judged the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway morally culpable of contributing to the obesity of mankind at the company's junk-food restaurant chain Dairy Queen, the Oracle of Omaha would be force-fed rats, snakes and toads.

Far from being an exercise in the ephemeral, Edwards says the panel's task is to discover if employing the seven deadly sins is necessary for success, and discuss what fate might await those moguls who skew the rules.

Buffett will be on the sin docket to be taken up by the panellists, as will Wall St titans such as Richard Grasso, former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. In 2004, Grasso pocketed a US$140 million ($206 million) pay package that triggered his resignation and a lawsuit instigated by New York State Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer over the compensation.

Good thing the demon Mammon is not in charge of the prosecution. Dante and St Gregory say Mammon has the clout to bring men like Grasso up on charges of greed. A guilty verdict comes with the penalty of being boiled alive forever.

"Davos is an opportunity to discuss issues and solutions that really matter to the global community," says James Turley, chairman and chief executive of Ernst & Young.

And the avarice and woes of the rich and famous are a hot topic. It is the most provocative subject at the forum, says sin panellist Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

The dinner of the damned offers an abundant menu: Former Tyco head Dennis Kozlowski and WorldCom founder Bernard Ebbers are behind bars; ousted Hollinger International chief executive Conrad Black has been charged with fraud; Italian prosecutors are investigating Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for fraud; and Refco head Phillip Bennett was arrested for camouflaging debt inside his trading house.

Perhaps all this is a reflection of Buffett's only known public comment on the underworld: "The derivatives business is like hell - easy to enter and almost impossible to exit."

Forum founder and president Klaus Schwab says today's global leaders "have an element of bad conscience for what they are doing".

"This is why they're shy about speaking publicly about morality and sin. It's a highly emotional issue and not considered part of the free market."

Yet sin is no taboo subject for shareholders. Last year, 72 per cent of the 1100 "investors" surveyed by Roper in the United States agreed that wrongdoing was widespread in business, up from 66 per cent in 2004.

A 2005 Harris poll showed 75 per cent of US adults as believing the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer", up from 68 per cent in 2004.

The consequence of a guilty decision on charges of pride, Dante writes, is eternity spent being broken on the wheel.

"Pride, gluttony and greed are the big three sins facing the corporate community," says Dutch economist Manfred Kets de Vries. "Grasso and Ebbers are already burning."

As for the eighth deadly sin, how about "nationalism in the name of God" and "not acting to change social and economic structures that kill people". Both could be unified as one sin under the Latin term ignorantia affectata or cultivated ignorance.

- BLOOMBERG