UK - F&C Asset Management tops a ranking of investment managers with the best engagement and transparency scores on environment, social and governance issues.

The assessment was made by FairPension, a UK based charity created in 2005 by Amnesty International and WWF.

State Street Global Advisors and Goldman Sachs came last with no points.

"They were not publicly transparent and provided no evidence of coherent company strategies on ESG issues," FairPensions noted on these fund managers.

F&C was the only fund manager to get full marks in both categories with Hermes, Insight and Morley in joint second place getting 83% because of poor transparency scores.

In the first report of its kind, FairPensions looked at the 20 most influential UK asset managers with combined assets under management of £7trn (€10trn) by assessing  information available on the company's homepage and sending out questionnaires.

"Pension funds are telling us they have delegated responsibility for SRI to fund managers so I think they will probably be quite interested to know some managers are not up to the job of handling this responsibility," Duncan Exley, campaign manager at FairPensions, told IPE.

A major problem was the lack in public scrutiny of fund managers over these issues, he added.

However, this is about to change, Exley noted. "Fund managers cannot assume that nobody will ever be looking at them."

Apart from increasing pressure from clients, including pension funds, the recently introduced UK Companies Act could help increase voting disclosure.

"The Companies Act itself contains a provision whereby the government can require fund managers to report on their voting at AGMs," Exley said. "Although it has not been of great importance so far there is a lot of interest brewing as most fund managers are not revealing their voting records. The government should even make it mandatory."

Topics