Thank you to Edward Nyarko for an insightful conversation about "Prospects for Business Acceleration in West Africa" on the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation - Market Avenue programme. In case you missed it, check out the interview here: https://lnkd.in/eS4fqX9g.
Anthony Murphy Shares His Four Top Tips For Impact Organisations Seeking Legal Advice In An Article For Pioneers Post
Anthony Murphy, our Founder and Managing Director, has shared his top four tips for impact organisations seeking legal advice in a new article published by Pioneers Post.
He writes:
Every social business, charity and impact investor needs legal support at some stage, especially when it comes to navigating their social finance options and deciding on the right legal structure to achieve their impact aims. But even if low cost or pro bono options are out there, it can be challenging to access – or know how to make good use of it.
The insights he provides will help any impact-driven business find out how to access the support they need while keeping costs low. We hope any such organisations in our network will find his advice useful.
You can read all of Anthony’s top tips by visiting the article on the Pioneers Post website here.
Prime Advocates ESG Assurance Summary of Federated Hermes Ltd Published
Leading international sustainability asset manager and stewardship firm Federated Hermes Limited has published a press release highlighting the unique work of Prime Advocates in assuring its responsible ownership, engagement and investment activities and processes. It can be read on their website here.
Leon Kamhi, Head of Responsibility at Federated Hermes, said: “Federated Hermes is known for its pioneering work in sustainable investing and stewardship. Prime Advocates assurance work externally validates the outstanding work our investment and stewardship teams put in, and responds to expectations embedded in the UK Stewardship Code seeking validation on how we deliver sustainable wealth creation for investors”.
Anthony Murphy, Managing Director at Prime Advocates, said: “Using our rigorous assurance approach we found that Federated Hermes uniquely leverages its deep and rich responsible investment history to underpin its market leading public policy and stewardship engagement activity and approach to ESG integration”.
Our summary of the work we undertook and our findings can be read here.
Greenwashing at DWS
As an environmental, social and governance (ESG) assurance and reporting provider, Prime Advocates has always been aware of the importance of asset managers accurately reporting the level of ESG integration in their portfolios. This includes the extent to which funds employ ESG screening and engage companies demonstrating weak performance on ESG issues.
ESG investment is increasingly popular. The Global Sustainable Investment Alliance estimated in its 2020 Investment Review that sustainability-aligned assets have swollen to 35.3 trillion USD globally, representing some 30% of all assets under management. However, it is unclear how many of these assets are truly sustainable and how many have been flagged as such for marketing purposes.
In recent weeks, DWS Group has come under scrutiny for false and misleading claims, with Asoka Woehrmann resigning as CEO of the firm on 1 June 2022 after DWS was embroiled in scandal. Since 2018, Deutsche Bank has held 79.5% of DWS, with the remaining 20.5% floating on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The news is therefore embarrassing for Deutsche Bank and awkward for other shareholders.
At the root of the controversy is DWS’s 2020 Annual Report, which claimed that more than half of the firm’s assets under management integrated ESG considerations. It emerged, however, that only a small number of its funds screened against ESG criteria. After inconsistencies emerged, both German regulators and the US Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission began to investigate DWS and its claims to employ ESG screening. At the end of May 2022, the situation escalated with a raid on DWS’s offices in Frankfurt by the German Financial Supervisory Authority, with evidence of wrongdoing being seized.
Since the announcement of the raid, DWS’s stock price has fallen rapidly. Sitting at 35.26 EUR on 30 May 2022, the day before the raid, it had fallen to 26.79 two weeks later on 13 June 2022, a decline of just over 24%. This follows another prolonged fall from a high of 41.75 EUR on 25 August 2021, the day it was announced that authorities in the US had opened up an investigation into ESG mis information at DWS. In total, DWS lost more than a third of its value within ten months.
This chain of events demonstrates that in a business environment in which stakeholder and market pressures may push asset managers to make ambitious and misleading claims about their sustainability, it is especially important for firms to ensure that they have a solid strategy for ESG integration and systemically and practically do what they say they do. Moreover, it demonstrates the value of external ESG data verification, both for the asset manager itself and for its investors, in order to bring trustworthiness to claims made in annual and impact reports.
Learning #1 of 10 - What We Thought We Would Do: “Everyone Has a Plan After the Fact”
Leaning #1 Everyone has a Plan after the Fact
With any end or high point, we are all inclined to find the shortest retrospective path to that point when looking back... a straight line, a clean narrative. However, my experience has been anything but linear in trajectory even though it may appear that way to external observers.
Prime Advocates in the Press
Our Founder and Managing Director, Anthony Murphy, has been featured in an article by HFM. In it, he discusses the expectations and approaches of both investors and hedge funds in the ESG sphere. The article is reprinted below.
