EUROPE – Corporate responsibility rating agency CoreRatings has been bought by Norwegian foundation Det Norske Veritas.

“The combined expertise of DNV and CoreRatings will offer the market a full range of services in the corporate responsibility and governance area, satisfying the call for measurement of material investment risks,” the two organisations said in joint release. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“CoreRatings and DNV are ideally suited to meet the demand of the market for independent assessment and verification of companies’ intangible assets,” said Henrik Madsen, chief operating officer of DNV Certification.

“There are exciting synergies in this relationship: CoreRatings’ analysis and DNV’s expertise neatly fills the knowledge gap between companies and their investors when linking management performance and intangible value to shareholder value,” said CoreRatings managing director Anne-Maree O’Connor.

O’Connor will stay with the company, said CoreRatings’ sales manager James Baird. DNV’s Ole-Andreas Hafnor has joined the CoreRatings board as chairman.

DNV is a Norwegian foundation that was founded in 1864 and has 5,800 employees. It is involved in areas such as certifying ships, risk management and research.

Meanwhile, Nordic index provider News Agency Direkt has teamed up with GES Investment Services to launch a set of ethical indices on the Nordic markets. The indices consist of all listed companies in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, with the exception of those companies that do not meet a set of ethical criteria.

“We think that these indices will serve as benchmark for asset managers that focus on ethical investments in the Nordic region and we can see that it pays off to have a long-term ethical investment philosophy”, said Pär Ståhl, manager of SME & Findata Direkt, News Agency Direkt.

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