Liontrust engagement and voting report 2021 - Flipbook - Page 7
ENGAGEMENT
While Liontrust has a centralised Governance and Stewardship team,
our six fund management teams apply their own distinct approaches
to engagement. Even within given teams, engagements take different
forms and objectives.
Some engagements are focused on improving our understanding of
ESG factors, while others are designed to effect positive change.
We recognise that change only usually occurs in the medium to
long term. Much of the groundwork we set in 2021 by engaging
with our investee companies will hopefully bear fruit in the coming
years. For example, we met many times with bp and Shell in 2021,
which built up our understanding of the companies’ approaches
to achieving net zero emissions and formed relationships that
should boost our influence in the future and help inform our voting
decisions.
We meet companies face to face (although in 2021 this mostly
occurred via video call) and correspond directly through emails,
calls and letters. Depending on the issues, our interactions with
companies might include board members, senior management,
investor relations or experts within organisations. We also
engage collaboratively with other investors who share our values
on initiatives that we believe are more likely to succeed through
collective action.
Liontrust’s Sustainable Investment team has been engaging with
companies on ESG matters for more than 21 years. It applies its
priorities to formulate campaigns on given topics, such as its 1.5
Degree Transition Challenge (see more on this below). There are
also examples of when they have engaged or voted on a given
issue over a series of years to bring about a positive outcome.
As active fund managers, most of the Liontrust investment teams
meet and engage with actual and prospective investee companies.
Many of these meetings cover ESG areas of discussion. In 2021,
most of them took the form of ‘virtual’ rather than face to face. In
total, 614 companies were met by our fund managers (including
the Sustainable Investment and the Governance and Stewardship
team) in 2021. These meetings covered financial performance and
strategy as well as ESG matters and 468 ESG issues were raised.
Here are the areas under discussion:
Environmental
25%
Social
39%
Governance
36%
Liontrust: Engagement and Voting Report 2021 - 7