Whistleblower system

Today, no company can be imagined without corporate compliance. With this code, the STI Group provides its employees with clear guidelines that must be observed in everyday work.

In order to implement the corporate rules and regulations, but also to be able to combat violations of the law or internal rules and regulations, as well as to meet legal requirements, the STI Group has implemented an IT-based whistleblower system on the basis of the EU Whistleblower Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report infringements of Union law), which aims to protect persons who report infringements. This serves as our central instrument for reporting suspicious cases in the STI Group. To underline the system's position of trust, we have set up the internal reporting office with an independent, external provider.

The whistleblower system is available as a central point of contact to all employees as well as business and cooperation partners or other stakeholders who wish to make a confidential and anonymous report of a suspected criminal offence or similarly serious irregularities relating to the STI Group. Due to the confidentiality and anonymity of the tips, it is ensured that the identity of whistleblowers is reliably protected and not disclosed. Every piece of information reported there is checked at several levels by the Chief Compliance and Data Protection Officer - this guarantees that no tip-off leads to a hasty reaction or prejudgement. The whistleblower system thus offers the STI Group the opportunity to react very quickly to grievances, avert damage to its reputation and improve internal processes, thereby helping to strengthen the trust of employees, customers and business partners in the integrity and responsiveness of the STI Group and an efficient compliance management system.

An anonymous report is possible via our external, independent service provider “hintcatcher”. The whistleblower system is provided exclusively for this purpose, technically ensures your anonymity - even when communicating via a chat function. For this purpose, the communication platform is not operated on servers or another system of STI Group, but on a secure server of “hintcatcher”. The hosting of the data takes place in Germany. “Hintcatcher” is ISO 27001 certified, EU GDPR compliant and meets the requirements of the EU Whistleblower Directive.