Responsible Investor

RI Global news round-up 10/12/07

RI’s bite-sized summary of this week’s responsible investment news.

Mercer, the investment consultant is to boost its specialist global responsible investment team from 11 to 14 people with new hires to be announced soon.
Mercer launched the specialist Responsible Investment (RI) business unit in 2004 and staff are spread between New York, Toronto, London, Tokyo and Melbourne. Investment consultants have been boosting the number of specialist RI staff in recent months to meet growing demand from institutional investors.
The €9.3bn ($13.1bn) AP7 Swedish pensions buffer fund is reportedly planning to invest SEK3bn (€319.2m) in environmental technology in the next three years via two private equity fund of funds mandates.
 Richard Gröttheim, AP7’s executive vice-president, told ipe.com that the fund will go public with the tenders at the beginning 2008. He said half of the total investment will be made in Sweden and the Nordic markets while the remaining assets will be invested in the US, Europe and Asia.
In October, Responsible Investor revealed that AP7 was planning investment in clean technology funds. It joins a growing number of pension funds making commitments to renewable energy.
The fund told Responsible Investor it was also examining potential investment in index related products.
Research by EIRIS ahead of International Human Rights Day on December 10 has found that 54 of the FTSE100 companies have operations in countries identified as being at high risk for human rights violation.

Of the FTSE 100 companies, 61% have made an explicit commitment to the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
EIRIS has launched new human rights research criteria to assess the performance of large corporations around the world.
F&C Investments has recruited George Dallas as director, corporate governance. Dallas joins F&C from Standard & Poor’s (S&P) in London where he was a managing director with responsibilities in the areas of analytical policy and research. At F&C he will report to Karina Litvack, head of governance and sustainable investment.
Dallas has written extensively on corporate governance and international finance and edited the book Governance and Risk (McGraw Hill, 2004).
Systematic Absolute Return, the Zurich based asset manager, will launch a global hedge fund-of-funds covering the clean energy sector in January. Hedge funds are increasingly moving into the clean tech space with regular new product launches. Arne Schmidt, managing partner at SAR, said: “We will be investing in long-short equity funds specialising in renewable energy, cleantech, water and carbon emissions. We believe that there are about 70 hedge funds of that type to choose from. We will also invest in asset-based investing funds, for example, in the carbon emissions space.”
Sindicatum Carbon Capital (SCC), the UK-based carbon trading company in which Citigroup and AIG

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