People & Appointments: Jo Saleeba moves to FTSE Russell

Jo Saleeba has been named by the London Stock Exchange Group as Head of Sustainable Investments in Australia and New Zealand for its indexing and analytics arm FTSE Russell. Saleeba was the inaugural CEO of Australian and New Zealand shareholder body the Investor Group on Climate Change, and also headed the responsible investment team at AU$60bn (€28bn) super fund HESTA until 2019.

Pat Miguel Tomaino has left his position as Director of Socially Responsible Investing at Boston SRI shop Zevin Asset Management to become a secondary school social studies teacher, according to a recent post on LinkedIn. His successor at Zevin is Marcela Pinilla, who joined the firm from nonprofit consultancy Business for Social Responsibility where she was Manager for Financial Services & Impact Investing.

Kei Okamura, Neuberger Berman’s Director of Japan Investment Stewardship, and Aina Fukuda, Legal & General Investment Management’s ESG Manager for Japan, have been appointed by the Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA) to head its working group on Japan. ACGA, whose members include BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors and UBS, set up the group in 2016 as a forum for members to “participate more actively in corporate governance and ESG issues pertinent to Japan and to help shape ACGA’s policy and advocacy work”.

MSCI has appointed Tia Counts as its first Chief Diversity Officer. Counts, who left her role as Head of Diversity and Inclusion for JP Morgan Asset Management to take up the post, has also held a number of senior roles at Morgan Stanley and began her career as a lawyer at Clifford Chance.

Miles Geldard has been appointed a non-executive Director at the Brunel Pension Partnership. Geldard, who was CEO of the Elephant Protection Initiative Foundation from 2019 to 2020, is also a member of the Investment Advisory Committee at Cerno Capital and an independent member of the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s Investment Committee. 

Natasha Landell-Mills, the stewardship head of Sarasin & Partners, has been appointed to the board of climate risk non-profit the Carbon Tracker Initiative according to recent filings.

The US International Development Finance Corporation has appointed two new senior officials to focus on climate change. Jake Levine has joined as Chief Climate Officer with Aparna Shrivastava as his Deputy Chief Climate Officer. Levine, who was most recently an attorney at Covington and Burling, has also served as Senior Counsel to California State Senator Fran Pavley and Chief of Staff to the President of Opower. Shrivastava has over a decade of experience in sustainable development across East Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia. Before joining DFC, she was the Climate Finance Lead at Mercy Corps.

Independent national steering group Impact Investing Ghana has appointed Amma Sefa-Dedeh Lartey as its new CEO. Lartey is the co-founder of Social Enterprise Ghana and Ghanaian online grocery supermarket MarketExpress, and sits on the board of Reach for Change Ghana.

Nuveen subsidiary GreenWood Resources has appointed Chris Lipton as its Head of Timberland Investment. Lipton, who was previously Managing Director for Timberland Mergers and Acquisitions at Hancock Natural Resources Group, will be responsible for GreenWood’s investment platform and operations as well as developing the company’s future timberland development strategy.