Mærsk-Ferrero supply chain partnership – hard questions remain unanswered

Comment on this article

• Andrea Gozzi

  June 03, 2026 at 4:19 pm

  The issue starts at the top. In his introduction to Maersk’s own Employee Code of Conduct, Clerc writes that compliance with the law “goes without saying” — he takes it for granted. In a compliance document, this is a troubling statement. A serious compliance system takes nothing for granted: it monitors, verifies, and reacts. Treating legal compliance as a given is not a position of confidence. It is the absence of control dressed up as certainty.

  Any Maersk customer enters a commercial relationship with a company that presents itself as ethically sound, backed by a Code covering labour rights, supply chain due diligence, and transparent engagement with public authorities. The Code itself states that Maersk commits to acting in a “consistent, respectful and upright” manner with governments and institutions. When the Genoa City Council summoned Maersk over the unlawful dismissal of a Maersk Italia employee, the institutional response was to look the other way. Customers cannot directly audit a global supplier’s internal practices. They rely on the code that supplier has publicly committed to. When that code is set aside the moment it becomes uncomfortable, the trust it was meant to underpin has no foundation.

  At the March 2025 AGM, Clerc reassured shareholders on military cargo by pointing to the absence of a submitted transport plan under the Maritime Security Program. This is a procedural argument that only holds if robust monitoring exists to confirm that procedures were not bypassed. He also declined shareholder requests for additional human rights due diligence disclosures, seeing no need for transparency beyond the minimum CSDDD obligations. Add Maersk’s refusal to respond to straightforward press questions about the Genoa case and the Ferrero partnership, and a pattern emerges: a company that avoids scrutiny precisely where its self-proclaimed standards are most under strain.

  An enterprise that chooses not to look cannot then ask stakeholders to trust its self-certifications. The Code of Conduct, the supplier commitments, the AGM assurances: these only carry weight if the organisation demonstrates that when compliance signals surface, the system reacts. Until Maersk provides facts and evidence rather than procedure references and silence, its ethical commitments remain a statement of aspiration, not governance.

  Log in to Reply