As much as I love a good ethical code, they seldom have the right framing for organizational governance. What is instead needed is a conflict of interest policy outlining:
- What qualifies as a conflict of interest, including what relationships might appear as conflicts of interest
- What standards there are for disclosing a conflict of interest - both upfront and during governing activities.
- How conflicts of interest are reported, to what extent are they available to other governing members or to the public.
- What consequences are there for violating the policy or withholding such information from other committee members.
Here is the Conflict of Interest policy we use at Open Privacy: https://openprivacy.ca/assets/conflict-of-interest-v2.pdf (in combination with this section of the BC Societies Act which details the standards expected under law: http://www.bclaws.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/15018_01#division_d1e4256)
The crux of the issue that it is simply not enough to have an implied ethical standard, but potential conflicts of interest need to be disclosed and recorded up front and kept as part of the records of the governing body.
In my view the MGRC should adopt a similar structure, with elected members declaring any real, potential or perceived conflicts of interest up front, allowing each other member to reference those conflicts during governance activities and allowing each member to declare a conflict during a vote and withdraw from the discussion and the vote.
If it is found that a member as voted on an issue in which they had an undeclared conflict of interest (real or perceived), then it would makes sense for such a matter to be investigated by the committee, the community - it is worth noting that dependent on how the MGRC is setup legally such actions may carry with them civil and/or criminal liability as they would under most laws governing such activities.