Annual Report and Accounts 2010

If we are to describe our approach to corporate social responsibility, we need to start from the nature of the operations our Company is engaged in. By its nature, the extraction of any type of mineral resource has some effect on the natural environment and landscape. In addition, many historical stereotypes in the perception of coal mining still persist, particularly those concerned with environmental pollution. As a result, sustainability has to be the guiding principle for all of us who work in the mining industry. In the areas where we mine coal, our Company has been active in various forms for more than 100 years and we wish to continue pursuing our activities here into the future. If we want to offer the residents of the areas we operate in the prospect of not only long-term employment but also quality of life over the next several decades, then all the steps we take and the investments we make must be governed by the idea of sustainability. That is our fundamental challenge and it is on this that we base our policy of corporate social responsibility.

The OKD Foundation, created three years ago, is a truly significant pillar of our corporate responsibility, but it is certainly not the only one – there are also projects for increasing occupational safety, employee care and educational support as well as other initiatives. If we talk about the motives for establishing the Foundation, we should go back a few years in our history. NWR’s management and shareholders wanted to return a designated portion of the Company’s income back into the region in which it operates. The idea was to create a model for resources distribution that would meet the requirements of complete transparency. And a corporate foundation, with four clearly defined grant programmes and a fixed cycle of grant-awarding rounds, best fitted these requirements. The public clearly knows in advance what areas the Foundation aims to channel its resources into, and everyone knows when and under what conditions they can apply for grants. An assessment of the submitted projects is performed in accordance with completely transparent criteria by a panel of publicly selected administrators recruited from respected non-profit organisations from all over the country. And finally, the Foundation provides a continuous stream of information on the actual allocation and use of the resources on its website, in its annual report and through other channels.

At the very beginning, we defined the goal of becoming a model corporate citizen. That, in our opinion, requires not only a comprehensible and transparent programme of corporate philanthropy, but also other equally significant principles of conduct. The relationship with our employees reflects our dedication to creating a safe and healthy working environment for both our employees and their families. This approach includes ensuring safe and adequate working conditions, fair remuneration and open dealings with our employees. We invest considerable resources greatly exceeding the statutory requirement in improving the safety of our operations each year. We consider this to be a matter of course. We have completed a major replacement of the working and protective gear for all those who work underground, increasing not only the level of safety, but also the level of comfort during work. The new state of the art equipment is fully comparable to that used in the most modern mines worldwide. The nature of the mining work is also gradually changing with the introduction of highly automated technology underground.

We wanted to avoid approaching our CSR policy in a formal manner right at the very beginning. We were more concerned with first starting specific projects, which we considered necessary. Only after that did we wish to present the projects to the public. That is why it is only this year that we are stepping forward with a CSR report. But future reports will be more extensive – we are preparing for regular comprehensive CSR reporting and plan to fully implement it starting from next year.

That would undoubtedly be the great recognition achieved in the Top Philanthropist 2010 ranking, a contest that provides the most prestigious acknowledgement in the field of corporate philanthropy in the Czech Republic. We placed second, which we consider to be an outstanding result given our still rather brief history of sponsorship and donations.