Our Responsible Investment overlays
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Voting
Voting is an effective tool to influence companies and to support and escalate our engagements. We believe that sound corporate governance is essential to creating value in companies, adding value for unitholders.
NAM’s Corporate Governance Principles focus on increasing transparency and openness in contacts between the com- pany and its shareholders. Our 2021 principles document also defines how we view transparency and what level of openness we expect from the companies we invest in. An important fac- tor in the funds’ ownership responsibility is to promote sound administration and to safeguard the common interests of uni- tholders. A healthy, long-term development in the administra- tion of the investee companies’ benefits shareholders, employ- ees and other stakeholders alike. The goal is to increase the return on fund investments and ensure smoothly functioning, reliable capital markets. The Corporate Governance team cooperates closely with NAM’s RI Team, which oversees our work on responsible investment together with the investment organisation. The teams maintain an ongoing ESG dialogue with companies - pre and post-AGM – to get a better understanding and push for continued improvements. Besides good governance, we place particular emphasis on our other focus areas, climate, human
rights and biodiversity. We see more and more shareholder proposals relating to e.g. environmental issues and climate reporting, and the support for these type of resolutions is also increasing. We welcome that interest in these issues is growing each year and that an increasing numbers of companies are supporting shareholder proposals around these questions. As we saw already in 2020, the ongoing pandemic has had a significant impact also on Corporate Governance in general and on Annual General Meeting (AGM) voting in particular. Unfortunately, we have not been able to physically attend as many AGMs over the last two seasons as we normally would, but instead focused on providing support to companies on, for example dividend policies and remuneration implications. There had been multiple stories in the media on changed remuneration schemes due to the weak markets seen in 2020 and into 2021. NAM tries to hold a pragmatic view and listen to the rationale given in the individual case in deciding whether to support such changes or not.
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