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In celebration of National Ethics Week, we sat down with our new Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, John Sardar, and were captivated by his global journey to our company.

John has spent his career shining a light on the importance of ethics and compliance.

Born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, John learned his core principles and values from his parents; his father is a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was a teacher who ran a school for underprivileged children. ​​​​​​​

Read more in our Q&A with John, below.

​​​​​​​Tell us more about you…

My family and I immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Long Beach, California, where we had extended family. Ours was a familiar tale of penniless immigrants trying to make a life in America. I attended California State University-Long Beach on a part-time basis for my degree in Economics while working as a sales clerk for the now-defunct Montgomery Ward department store.

I then attended St. Louis University’s School of Law, and after graduating with my Juris Doctor degree, I worked for the St. Louis County Counselor’s office as a civil attorney. I had the interesting and difficult task of investigating allegations of misconduct by federal agents leading to their 1993 confrontation with the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas.

Soon thereafter, I joined a large law firm in St. Louis, and later took an opportunity to work in their office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which started my lifelong involvement with international legal and compliance matters.

Since then I’ve lived and worked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My work eventually expanded to leading ethics and compliance matters for clients in Africa, Europe, Russia/Caspian, Middle East, and the Asia Pacific Regions. After living in Houston for nearly a decade, my family and I recently moved to Michigan for this opportunity with DTE. ​​​​​​​

Tell us more about your family…

My wife, Ayumi (pronounced “I-U-Me”), and I met in graduate school. She is originally from a town not too far from Mt. Fuji, and almost every summer, we go to Japan to visit with her folks. ​​​​​​​

My daughter, Aiko (pronounced “I-Ko”), has spent part of every summer with her grandparents in Japan since she was 6 months old. Our other family member is Sam, a 9-year-old miniature schnauzer.

Ayumi and I love to travel, and Aiko has learned to appreciate discovering new places in the world because of that love.  ​​​​​​​

Someone told me that the exciting places we have taken our daughter to are like building blocks. She said that we can see the outer stones of Pyramids in Egypt, where we took Aiko when she was three years old, but we don’t see the stones inside that support the massive structure. Every experience, she said, adds to Aiko’s knowledge, even at that young age. It was one of the wisest things I have ever heard. As a parent, I’m glad I heard it when Aiko was still a young child, so that I didn’t shy away from exposing her to all sorts of new experiences even though she might not consciously remember them.

How do you connect Compliance and Ethics Awareness Week with our day-to-day operations?

As we begin celebrating National Corporate Compliance and Ethics Awareness Week, it is a time for all of us to think about how we each champion ethical business practices and compliance standards in the way we do our work and how we respectfully interact with one another.

We all play a part in part in building and maintaining an active and robust ethical culture by making the right choice, as we go through our daily activities and by speaking up when we witness or are aware of potential misconduct or non-compliance.

We should all look for new opportunities this week to promote the importance of ethics and compliance in our operations and in the way we interact with one another, our customers, our vendors, our communities, and investors.