MP Pension, one of Denmark’s largest pension funds, approved a name change at its digitally-held annual general meeting (AGM) – an outcome its chief executive officer hailed as freeing the fund up to attract more customers.

At its AGM last week, scheme members of the soon-to-be re-named AkademikerPension also voted against a motion to divest gas stocks and bonds whose issuers failed to live up to the objectives of the Paris Agreement — to keep global temperature rise below 2°C — despite having supported major climate moves in the last few years.

Jens Munch Holst, MP Pension CEO, said: “AkademikerPension is a perfect name to accommodate all our members, and at the same time we can move forward with our strategy of attracting new customers to our unique value proposition for high returns on a responsible basis.”

MP Pension said it would adopt the new name on 1 September, which was approved by 91% of the nearly 2,400 scheme members attending the online meeting – an attendance figure the pension fund said was up 30% from last year’s AGM.

“This indicates that members who have normally been barred from attending the physical general meeting have now been given the opportunity to participate in the debate,” said Munch Holst.

The DKK128bn (€17.2bn) fund also reported its members voted against a proposal from Danish campaign group Ansvarlig Fremtid (Responsible Future) to drop all shares and bonds in gas companies failing to align with the goals of the Paris pact.

Some 68% of its members opposed the motion, with just 32% voting in favour, the fund reported.

At MP Pension’s 2019 AGM, members voted for the fund to sell off bonds in companies that extract coal, tar sands and oil, and the 2017 AGM saw the goals of the Paris Agreement being written into MP Pension’s investment policy by a unanimous supervisory board.

MP Pension recently became the third Danish pension fund to sign up to the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (AOA).

The bulk of MP Pension’s customers are members of the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs (DM); the Danish Psychological Association (DP), and the Danish National Union of Upper Secondary School Teachers (GL).

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