ICGN Stewardship Disclosureawards

ICGN Stewardship DisclosureAwards

Assessment Criteria 2018

About the Awards

The ICGN Global Stewardship Principles emphasise the value of transparency, disclosure and reporting as a means of demonstrating an investor’s commitment to stewardship and providing accountability to clients, beneficiaries and investee companies.

The purpose of these awards, being awarded for the first time in 2018, is to recognize investors who provide genuine insight into their stewardship policies and how they are implemented, and whose approach to disclosure provides a model that others might follow.

There are two awards:

• ICGN Stewardship Disclosures Award (Asset Owners)

• ICGN Stewardship Disclosures Award (Asset Managers)

The ICGN Awards Committee will draw up shortlists for both awards, with the winners then being selected by a separate panel of judges. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in London, to be held on 4 December 2018.

Eligibility

There is no nomination process. All investors who are ICGN members are automatically eligible for these awards, and the disclosures on their websites will be assessed as part of the process by which the shortlists will be decided.

If you are eligible for one of the awards and wish to make sure that all disclosures on your stewardship policies and practices are considered, please send the relevant link(s) to your websiteto Milly Sheehan () by 31 March 2018.

Criteria

Disclosures will be assessed against five broad criteria:

• Stewardship policies. We will be looking for clear statements of what the investors’ policies are, what factors are considered when those policies are developed, what assets they apply to, and how the investor aims to ensure that activities delegated to others are undertaken in a manner that is compatible with their own policies. For those investors that are signatories to stewardship codes, we would expect to see a clear statement of how they apply the code.

• Conflicts of interest. We will be looking for a meaningful description of the actions taken by the investor to mitigate specific potential conflicts, in addition to a statement of their policies.

• Engagement. We will be looking for disclosures that provide an insight into the basis on which the investor assesses the need for engagement, and the circumstances in which it will consider escalating that engagement. Evidence will also be sought on how those policies have been implemented during the previous twelve months, including specific examples.

• Voting policies and records. To get a good rating under this heading, we will expect to see the investor’s voting records as well as policies being disclosed in a way that enables the reader to understand the reasons that individual voting decisions were taken. The description of voting policies would include information on the extent to which the investor uses proxy research and voting services.

• Transparency. We will assess the accessibility, relevance and reliability of the disclosures; for example, by assessing how much of the information is publicly available and when it was last reviewed and updated. We will also look at the extent to which the investor provides information about their internal governance as well as their stewardship policies and activities.

The assessment will be based on the disclosures of the investor’s website as at 31 March 2018.

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