Check up – Kinds of Conflict of Interest

If you sit on a governing body, a Conflict of Interest can arise when:

1. You have a direct or indirect interest that conflicts with or influences the performance of your duties to the organisation you govern.

2. You start to intervene in the everyday management of your organisation in order to get a friend or relative employed, or to get special treatment or favoured access to particular resources.

3. You vote on a matter that helps your own business, or makes it harder for your commercial opposition to compete with you in the marketplace.

4. You vote on a land ownership or use issue that increases the value of your property, and to the detriment of others

5. You are in a position to benefit a friend or relative as a result of your position in office, when this benefit would not otherwise be available to them. This is often termed indirect conflict of interest.

6. You fail to declare any of these ‘potential conflicts of interest’. For example, one of your family members might quite properly submit a tender to do some paid work for the organisation. When this happens, the elected member should let everyone on the governing body know that they have a potential conflict of interest, and then abstain (not participate) from voting on that tender.

Declaring you may have a potential conflict of interest is called ‘ethical behaviour’.
It means you avoid actually having a real conflict of interest by saying it to everyone at the meeting (being ‘transparent’), and then not voting on the issue yourself (abstaining).