Liontrust Sustainable Investment Engagement and Voting Annual Review 2021 - Flipbook - Page 4
The Advisory Committee
Lastly, at the beginning of each year, we prioritise a number
of proactive engagement initiatives in collaboration with our
Advisory Committee. We assess how portfolio holdings are
positioned on these issues and, where appropriate, define target
Sophie Tickell is Co-founder and Director
of Meteos, a non-profit company, which
runs senior dialogues, focused on finance,
health and the environment. She is the author
of ‘Banking on Trust’, ‘Vital Connections:
Science, Society and Sustaining Health’, the
EnergyFutures report, and the PharmaFutures
(www.pharmafutures.org) series. Sophia was
previously Chair of the Board at SustainAbility
Ltd and led Oxfam’s policy work on the private
sector. Sophia is also Non-Executive Director
of Liontrust Asset Management.
lists of companies with which to engage. Our Advisory Committee
has oversight of all our engagement efforts, our proactive plans
and reporting, and is there to ensure that we remain focused on
engagement that benefits our funds.
Tony Greenham is Director of Economy,
Enterprise and Manufacturing at the RSA
(Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and
Commerce), where he leads a programme
of policy research into the future of work,
social impacts of technology, green industrial
strategy and economic democracy. He is
a former corporate stockbroker and has
written extensively on financial sector reform
including the undergraduate economics
textbook ‘Where Does Money Come From?’
Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum
for the Future, the UK’s leading sustainable
development charity. His book, ‘The World
We Made’, seeks to inspire people about
the prospects of a sustainable world in 2050.
He is also Chancellor of Keele University
and President of The Conservation Volunteers
and former Chair of the UK Sustainable
Development Commission.
Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the
University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding
of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). From 2004 to 2011, he was
Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development
Commission, where his work culminated in the publication of the
controversial bestseller ‘Prosperity without Growth’ – economics for
a finite planet.
Valborg Lie is Stewardship Manager at LGPS Central, responsible
for bespoke engagement and voting services to support investment
objectives. She has a wealth of experience, working on responsible
investment (RI) issues over the last 15 years. From 2005 to 2013,
she worked as Head of RI within the Norwegian Ministry of Finance,
overseeing the management of the Norwegian Government Pension
Fund Global (GPFG), one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds
globally. Valborg leverages an extensive network of institutional investors
and SWFs globally to help promote and build RI best practices.
Collaborative engagement
In addition to direct engagement with companies, we also
engage collaboratively with other investors on initiatives and
projects aligned with our own priorities and where we believe
we are more likely to succeed collectively. In some instances, we
lend our support to collaborative initiatives that target companies
not held in our portfolios.
Voting
Our team conducts considered annual voting for equity holdings
across our portfolios and we are very active owners, typically
voting against management on at least one vote at around 60%
of voteable meetings in 2019. Our Sustainable Investment voting
policies are publicly available and structured by geographic area.
Full details of such activities can be found on page nine. As an
example, we joined the United Nations Principles for Responsible
Investment (UN PRI) Working Group for a Just Transition, which
acknowledges the need to factor the social dimension into the
move to a lower carbon economy.
We publicly disclose all our decisions
and the rationale for each vote, with
details to be found at www.liontrust.
co.uk/sustainable. We communicate our
voting intentions to companies and engage
with them on issues of contention to effect
change so that we can vote in
favour in subsequent years.
4 - Liontrust Sustainable Investment: Engagement and Voting: Annual Review 2019
