All Special Report articles – Page 119
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Special Report
Digging up the dirt
Today extractive companies - those specialised in extracting natural resources from the ground - are operating in environments that are very different to those in which they operated 10 or more years ago. The oil industry is a good example. As oil reserves in areas such as the North Sea ...
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Special Report
US voting demands
A group of 14 institutional investors from the UK, Netherlands, Australia and Canada have called for an overhaul of the American voting standard regarding the election of US corporate directors. They say it is “prone to abuse” and “inconsistent” with democratic values. In a letter addressed to the American Bar ...
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Special Report
Investors act on climate change
On 14 September, in the New York offices of investment bank JP Morgan, around 200 institutional investors, financial analysts and government officials gathered to hear the results of the third Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire. Speaking were luminaries including Margaret Beckett, the UK’s secretary of state for the environment; Jim ...
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Special Report
Hope for German SRI?
The rather lacklustre progress of SRI in Germany’s institutional investment market was given a boost in July when the Bundesrat, the country’s upper house, passed legislation extending the SRI reporting obligation for Pensionfonds to the much more numerous and asset-rich Pensionskassen. The reporting obligation that requires funds to disclose whether ...
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Special Report
Versiko's 'passionate' team
Opportunities in the German SRI market vary, depending on one’s focus. Pensionkassen and other forms of retirement institution with deficits and minimum return guarantees on their minds are wary enough of equities as a whole, never mind new concepts which may appear at first sight to compromise the all important ...
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Special Report
Mid-summer madness
There seem to be signs of it all over the place, the only question is where to start. Okay I could start with the usual concerns - Why are long term bond interest rates so low? How low a real yield will investors in index linked bonds accept? Why have ...
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Special Report
Mainstream-type returns is key
The UNISON staff pension scheme in the UK has committed all of its equities investment - two-thirds of total assets - to SRI. In September 2003, the fund put £100m (e150m) into an SRI mandate run by Morley Fund Management. At the time, it was the largest sum ever to ...
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Special Report
It's a matter of principles
An obvious contributor to the debate on how environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues should be incorporated into investment policy is the United Nations (UN), or more precisely the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The global factor - reach, consistency and influence - is what makes it so obvious. UNEPFI ...
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Special Report
Fund members' social conscience
Danish industry-wide pension fund PKA, which has assets of more than E12bn, has recently adjusted its ethical guidelines for the fund’s investments. But this is certainly not the first time that ethical investment has been on the fund’s agenda – PKA has worked with ethical aspects of its investments for ...
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Special Report
FRR reflecting interests of community
The French pensions reserve fund, Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), is in the process of devising and awarding SRI mandates. It has already appointed consultancy Bfinance to help with the request for proposals, and the tender process was launched at the end of June. The whole manager selection ...
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Special Report
Encouraging change in firms
Directors of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) decided to adopt a policy of responsible investment in 1999. USS, the occupational pension fund for UK Universities, with assets of about £20bn (e30bn), is the second largest corporate pension fund in the UK. David Russell, adviser on responsible investment at USS, says ...
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Special Report
Walk before you can run
Although most people in the investment industry agree pension funds are becoming more interested in SRI, there are many different ways of approaching it. From choosing how strictly they should judge companies they invest in, to defining why they want SRI in the first place, pension funds face a series ...
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Special Report
Active dialogue comes to fore
Gradually, socially responsible investment (SRI) is becoming more ingrained in the way that participants in the market do business. A survey by Mercer Investment Consulting in April concluded that SRI practices were becoming mainstream among investment managers. Within 10 years, it said, SRI would become a common component of mainstream ...
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Special Report
Investors take LTRI initiative
The last five years have seen a sea change in investment beliefs and practices. Previously those who might have raised concerns about market short-termism would have been dismissed as ideologically motivated critics, and those who favoured SRI, as having other agendas. While passionate defenders of the status quo have not ...
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Special Report
Who's for governance?
Corporate governance has been on the agenda for many years, but for most pension schemes the attention has been focused on the governance of the companies in which they invest rather than the governance of the pension fund itself. Now, however, pension schemes and their governing boards are being subject ...
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Special Report
Getting to the point
Pictet has been developing tools to assess companies’ SRI credentials since 1997. The problem, it seems, is that much of the information provided by companies under examination is incomplete. “Very often a company will put together a sustainability report but it will only show what it wants to show,” says ...
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Special Report
Hungary comes of age
As market forces took hold across the former eastern bloc following the collapse of communism, the emergence of a thin layer of very wealthy individuals was one of the most visible, and disturbing developments. How can a system of supposed equality give way to such apparent inequality? Is it the ...
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Special Report
Uphill in Netherlands
According to the the Dutch Association of Sustainable Investors (VBDO): “Dutch pension funds hardly give any information on how they include social and environmental aspects in their asset management.” The VBDO reported that the total volume of socially responsible investments (SRI) of Dutch pension funds had increased to about 3.3% ...
