Martin Burns offers a guide to identifying conflicts of interest in dispute resolution
When RICS appoints a third party to resolve a dispute we must take care to ensure the appointee is appropriately qualified to discharge the role, and has no conflicts of interest. But how do we decide if someone is conflicted?
Black v white
Life would be much easier if we had a list of every possible situation that could arise and labelled each as either “black” to indicate something is a conflict, or “white” to indicate it is not.
Those who like to keep things simple may be heartened to learn that I actually believe the subject of conflicts is indeed about black and white situations. Less pleasing perhaps is the reality that black and white situations are tiny in number when compared to those that are shades of grey.
For me, black indicates a tiny number of situations where it is obvious and undeniable that a conflict exists, and anyone would recognise this. White represents a tiny number of situations where there is clearly no conflict of interest.
