Ceylon Chamber of Commerce to recognise ‘Best Corporate Citizen 2014’ today

The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce will hold its 11th consecutive Best Corporate Citizen Sustainability Awards 2014 ceremony on Tuesday evening (25 November 2014) at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel Colombo, which will see the ‘Sustainability’ stars of the Corporate World being recognised for their untiring efforts to adopt ‘Best Sustainability Practices’ in their business processes.

The event will see the participation of over 400 distinguished guests, who will include the cream of the local corporate sector, competitors of the event and the public officials among many others.
The event’s keynote speech wil be delivered by Dr. Subir Gokarn, an Indian economist, who was also a former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, while Hilmy Cader, International CEO of MTI Consulting will address the gathering as the Guest of Honor.
The ceremony, which is to start at 6:30 p.m., will see the 1st runner up, 2nd runner up and the Best corporate Citizen award winner for 2014 as well as 1st runner up 2nd runner up and winner of the Less than 15 bn turn over category, being awarded.
The ceremony will also see 10 companies who have adopted best sustainability practices in their businesses being awarded as the recipients of the ‘Ten Best Corporate Citizen’s’ award, while there will also be a number of sector and category awards for companies, who have excelled in areas such as Employee Relations, Customer and Supplier relations, CSR, Economic Contribution, Financial Performance and Governance and reporting, Infrastructure, Financial services, agriculture, to name a few. Over 70 firms, who came forward to take part in the Best Corporate Citizen Sustainability Award 2014 will be vying for a award at this year’s BCCS, which commenced in the year 2004. The decade old BCCS competition shows the commitment shown by the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce towards helping the local corporate firms to adopt and adapt to the Sustainable practices to help preserve the planet.
Firstly, it was the culmination of the first ever CSR week in Sri Lanka, which the Chamber conducted with the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN), CSA Asia Centre at AIT and the Mangroves for the Future Programme.
“In today’s corporate environment making profits and meeting shareholder expectations are no longer the only objectives. Today the process of wealth creation is measured not just in terms of return on investment but also in terms of a corporate’s impact on society and the environment. Indeed the triple bottom line – profits, planet and people – is here to stay,” says Ceylon Chamber of Commerce Chairman Suresh Shah.
Every year, the submissions for the BCCS competition was evaluated and judged by a competent and an independent panel of judges and evaluators, who spends over a month’s period to make the final selections.
Prof. Uditha Liyanage, Professor of Management and the  Postgraduate Institute of Management was the Chairman of the Evaluators Panel of the BCCS Panel of the year 2014, while  Palitha Fernando – Former Attorney General functioned as the Chairman of the Judges Panel.