OREANDA-NEWS. February 06, 2009. Kyiv hosted the first Eurasian summit "Corporate Social responsibility: Strategy and the Best Practices of Sustainable Development in Eurasia”, reported the press-centre of SCM.

The event organizers were: Russian Managers Association, Kommersant-Ukraine Publishing House, CSR Centre of the Graduate School of Management (Russia), UN Development Program (Russia), European Commission and UN Global Compact (Ukraine).

Within the framework of the summit representatives of business, expert and academic communities, international organizations and NGOs, public authorities and business and public and political mass media of Ukraine, Russia and Eurasian countries got an opportunity to exchange the best CSR practices, discuss actual CSR issues and development tendencies, and generate standards in this field.

SCM was presented by Alexandra Zayarnaya, CSR Manager of SCM, in the discussion panel "Business information transparency strategy as a guarantee of its sustainability”.

She reported about SCM experience of preparing social report in line with international standards: SCM is the first Ukrainian company managing large diversified business, which has prepared Sustainability Report according to the Global Compact Initiative requirements (GRI).

"SCM is committed to openness and transparency and has been showing information about its performance to the stakeholders since 2006", noted Alexandra Zayarnaya. – We are making social reports because we strive to doing business to international standards and regard social reporting as a social and environmental management instrument. The Report was developed by the SCM Group employees without engagement of external advisers as we believe that lessons and outcomes derived from such experience are as important as the Report itself.

The Report includes information about 27 major enterprises of the Group. It represents data on 21 performance indicators and 26 standard report elements of GRI Manual; it was analyzed in the context of Ukrainian legislation and requirements of statistical authorities. In future, SCM will develop own guidelines for preparation of sustainability reports for enterprises of the Group.

While preparing the report we managed to systemize the information on social investments at the level of SCM Group. Our calculations have shown that in 2007 SCM investments in development of local communities as well as in social and charitable programmes exceeded USD 20 million.

The key points of the speech by Alexandra Zayarnaya and the presentation "Social responsibility: a process or a product?" are available on the corporate website of the SCM Group.