Denmark’s statutory pension fund ATP has written to companies in its investment portfolio to guide them on the level of detail it expects from them in their reporting under the new EU sustainability rules.

Mikkel Svenstrup, the DKK710bn (€95.2bn) pension fund’s chief investment officer, and Claus Wiinblad, the fund’s head of equities, have written to ATP’s Danish portfolio firms about the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), saying they should focus on what is important when undertaking the reporting work.

Svenstrup, who sits on the steering group for ATP’s CSRD implementation project, said in a post on LinkedIn: “Before getting lost in too much detail, it is important to stay focused on the purpose of CSRD.”

“CSRD must bring relevant and essential information to the accounting users – both the financial and societal stakeholders,” he added.

“And therefore you must constantly keep an eye on what the value of the information is for the end user – especially when we look at the individual data points,” the CIO said.

The EU’s new rules on corporate sustainability reporting, CSRD, came into force in January 2023, and were aimed at modernising and strengthening existing rules on the social and environmental information that companies have to report.

Companies subject to the directive will have to report according to European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and will have to apply the new rules for the first time in the 2024 financial year, for reports published in 2025.

With 1,200 individual data points, many of which are new to companies, Svenstrup said, one could quickly spend a lot of time closing data gaps.

“At ATP, we prefer to report on fewer data points that are significant, rather than reporting on many that are not significant,” he noted.

ATP’s expectation was, he said, that companies look at their core value chains, where they either had a large impact or were of great financial importance.

“This is both in relation to opting in and out of thematic standards and the underlying data points,” Svenstrup said.

The CIO said ATP hoped the letter would be an impetus “for a sensible implementation of CSRD, so that it pushes us all together in a more sustainable direction”.

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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