Marco Rossi, the secretary of ISO’s powerful Technical Management Board (TMB) has confirmed they have opened a formal investigation into conflicts of interest by Nigel Croft, after Oxebridge’ filed a formal complaint on the manner.
The probe comes weeks after Croft posted a semi-threatening message on LinkedIn warning others in TC 176 that “leadership knows who you are” for supporting Oxebridge’s reporting on ISO scandals. Croft falsely claimed he has not been an “ISO consultant” since the 1990s, something disproved by the marketing of his company, the Croft Global Alliance, which was still in operation as of 2020.
That post earned Croft a formal complaint from Oxebridge, which cited not only Croft’s conflicts of interest in his ISO work, but that he was now appearing to lie about the conflicts in public.
Croft has been a powerful ISO figure since the mid-2010s, taking leadership positions in key ISO committees within TC 176 and the TMB itself. He has been repeatedly appointed to committees by the UK certification body BSI, despite no longer living in that country.
For weeks, ISO and TMB remained silent on the complaint filed by Oxebridge. However, TMB finally responded after the publication of an opinion piece by Oxebridge founder Christopher Paris two days ago.
Paris’ opinion piece revealed that for early ten years, Croft himself had been leaking internal ISO information, despite his recent LinkedIn post which called Oxebridge’s reporting “shoddy pseudo-journalism.”
Formal ISO policies prevent leaders such as Croft from using their position to make public statements such as this, and specifically prohibit them from attacking other ISO representatives.
Both BSI and ISO have spent considerable reputational resources on advancing Croft’s career, due — according to Paris — to his willingness to work with ISO Secretary-General Sergio Mujica on advancing controversial executive decisions. Under Mujica and Croft, the TMB has been granted extraordinary powers to draft standards outside of the normal process which requires the use of elected Technical Committee members and subject matter experts. This has resulted in entire swaths of standards being written by the TMB, rather than subject matter experts, through imposed text known as “Annex SL.” Croft has been a supporter of this approach and recently floated a formal proposal that would give his Joint Task Group additional powers equal to, if not higher than, those of the TMB itself.
As a result, it is not expected that the TB nor Mujica will take any concrete steps to rein in Croft, and that the investigation will be done in secret, with no actual outcomes evident.
