The Robin Cosgrove Prize Launched to Promote Ethics in Finance

October 3, 2006

A major new international prize to promote awareness among young people in banking and related industries of the need for respect for ethics has its international launch today.

The Robin Cosgrove Prize will award USD 20,000 in prize money for creative and unpublished papers setting out projects or proposals for innovative ways to promote ethics in finance and banking.

The prize will be open to young people throughout the world aged 35 or under. Entries from emerging markets are especially welcome.

The Robin Cosgrove Prize honours the vision of Robin, a bright investment banker who died at age 31. He believed passionately that a major barrier to economic development was the absence of integrity and often the lack of ethical practice in banking and financial systems. “How can a country prosper”, he would ask, “if people cannot trust their banks or financial institutions?”

The prize is supervised by the Observatoire de la Finance, a Swiss not-for-profit foundation based in Geneva (www.obsfin.ch).

The Observatoire, working in cooperation with Dr Carol Cosgrove-Sacks, Robin’s mother and a former director in the United Nations in Geneva, has set up a distinguished international jury to evaluate the papers submitted for the prize.

Notes for Editors

Entries for the competition for the Prize are invited to address the subject of Innovative Ideas for Ethics in Finance.

Papers must be submitted to the Observatoire before the deadline of midnight, 28 February 2007 (CET). The entries may be submitted in English or in French (they could be written in another language but a translation into English or French is compulsory).

Further details regarding the Prize, Robin’s vision, the international jury, and the terms and conditions for submitting papers for the 2006-7 Prize will be found at the website www.robincosgroveprize.org.

For more information, please contact Mrs Sibilla Guidotti, +41 (0)22 346 30 35, office@obsfin.ch.