Corporate governance is a system to manage and supervise the company. It defines how rights and duties are distributed among company stakeholders, including shareholders, executive management, governing bodies, employees, and customers. The corporate governance system is a set of legal and executive methods and procedures committing us to maintain a balanced relationship between the company and its workforce.
The aim is to engage in responsible, qualified, and transparent business management focused on the company’s long-term success and the protection of stakeholder interests.
The Škoda Auto Group, to which Škoda X s.r.o. belongs, attaches great store by the fact that it is perceived as a successful, transparent and open company by employees, business partners, all customers and the public at large.
Since 2007, the Škoda Auto Group has subscribed to relevant recommendations and rules set out in the Corporate Governance Code Based on OECD Principles (the “Code”). By continuously improving its internal processes and rules in accordance with the Code, we wish to fuel support for transparency and ethical behaviour in business practices in the Czech Republic.
At the same time, corporate policy rests on principles enshrined in the “Code of Conduct at Škoda Auto Group”. The Code of Conduct in place is based on the application of generally accepted social values.
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‍Integrity
‍We believe that only with lasting, dependable integrity and compliant behaviour will our Company gain and strengthen the trust of its staff, customers, shareholders, business partners and the general public. Our aim is to become a role model when it comes to integrity and compliance. This way, we want to strengthen trust and to maintain integrity of our company in the future.
Acting with integrity is an essential part of our Group strategy TOGETHER 2025+ and is thus on par with the quality of our products, our financial KPIs and the satisfaction of our customers. By implementing our ambitious Integrity program and the Group Essentials, which provide orientation for the daily value-oriented actions of all employees, we are ready to face future challenges.
The key initiative “integrity program” is also a part of the Together4Integrity Program. It has the goal of increasing understanding of integrity and its importance as a basis of doing business among all the Volkswagen Group’s employees and managers and of creating a culture in which acting with integrity is not only consistently possible, but also seen as a matter of course. It is associated with encouraging the constructive handling of mistakes, increasing the transparency of reasons for decisions and strengthening courage to also address potential risks and issues with managers.
Integrity is a core element of professional conduct for us and this is the only thing we aim for: to do the right thing in a given situation.
As the basis for running our business, integrity must affect all levels. This means integrity is an obligatory criterion for all the Board of Management’s decisions: every submission to the Board of Management must include an opinion by the responsible company´s department on the way in which the intended decision support the Group’s integrity and compliance or whether/ what potential integrity or compliance risks are associated with it and how they can be lessened.
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‍Compliance
‍Škoda X s.r.o.. as a company and the Škoda Auto Group as a whole are rigorous in their duty of adherence to legislation, internal regulations, ethical principles and other voluntary commitments. Compliance reaches beyond business relations to embrace activities both within and outside the group. This is the Škoda Auto Group’s way of signalling loudly and clearly that its conduct will echo the requirements of legal and ethical rules on competition, finances and taxes, environmental protection and employee relations, including the safeguarding of equal opportunities.
Škoda Auto a.s. has a Governance, Risk & Compliance Department to oversee the pursuit of these values and with which Škoda X s.r.o. closely cooperate. This department’s work includes the provision of consulting on all compliance-related issues and the implementation of appropriate measures to raise awareness of the intrinsic value of compliance among the workforce and 3rd parties. For the purposes of the above-mentioned consultancy serves at Škoda X an e-mail address compliance@skoda-auto.cz.
The Škoda Auto Group staunchly believes that economic success is sustainable only if everyone sticks to the rules. Voluntary standards – consisting of statutory and internal requirements, obligations stemming from the commitments that have been made, and ethical principles – are a company mainstay and form the bedrock of its decision-making. Compliance activities provide a means to implement strategy formulated by the Volkswagen Group and are part of global compliance efforts.