About

Headquartered in central Stockholm, SSAB is the hugely successful Swedish-Finnish materials and mining company formed in 1978, which specialises in processing raw material into steel. As a global business, SSAB regularly encounters laws and regulations designed to promote fair competition and encourage ethical and legal behaviour. Pia Tanskanen, general counsel, and her legal team are tasked with the safe operations of SSAB internationally, covering everything from legal risk to employee compliance. As a consequence of this outlook, the business ethics function is organised as a large part of the legal function, providing a needed focus on developing and coordinating SSAB´s anticorruption program across the company and promoting the principles of ethical business behaviour. The team has established a very detailed code of conduct, which succinctly outlines typical challenges that the company’s employees face complying with external legislation, and measures which can be taken to overcome those challenges. SSAB’s legal team also strives to ensure that the company maintains a global culture of respect, honesty and integrity. By providing a framework for business ethics and compliance, the legal team has been able to go further and implement a company-wide whistle-blower program for employees to seek guidance or report serious improprieties and violations of the company’s policies. SSAB’s legal team has undertaken many steps to guarantee the whistle-blower program allows employees to report anonymously about serious issues and violations of SSAB’s various policies. Lastly, the legal team proved instrumental in finalising the company’s 2014 acquisition of Finnish steel manufacturer Rautaruukki, in a deal worth roughly €1.1 bn.