That the CFA Institute – as an ORGANIZATION – professes to care about ethics should come as no surprise. Much as the American Institute of CPAs also professes to care about ethics, despite the clear conflicts that many CPAs face and often don’t handle particularly well. (Throw the American Bar Association vis-a-vis lawyers in there as well. I could go on.)
There are a long list of CFAs that get censured each year to varying degrees, so it’s not as if the organization is completely asleep at the wheel. But it’s not easy to track unethical conduct.
So, I think you’re confusing the goals of the organization with the actual conduct of certain individual members. Two completely different things. I think there are very few professional organizations that are particularly effective at enforcing ethics – CFA Institute or otherwise. But, at the organizational level, they all claim that it’s important… of course.
