Capital owners (shareholders, and investors) were identified as companies’
stakeholders in 89% of the analyzed codes of ethics. General policies which could
be mentioned when designing a code of ethics regarding the capital owners are
presented in Table 2 with a detail on the item’s occurrences in the code of ethics of
the target sample companies. The ethical policies most promoted by companies are
Insider trading (79%) and Reporting performance of the company (42%). At the
opposite pole, the ethical policies less mentioned are Business conduct and
engagement (21%) and Communication with capital owners (11%). These
distributions of frequencies show that companies have a powerful orientation
towards obtaining profits.