RI People & Appointments, December 10: Carbon Tracker’s Mark Lewis joins BNP Paribas AM

Mark Lewis is joining BNP Paribas Asset Management as Head of Climate Change Investment Research, after less than a year at Carbon Tracker. Lewis, a member of the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and former Head of European Utilities Research at Barclays, will begin the newly-created role at BNP in early January, joining recently-appointed SRI veteran and fellow member of the TCFD, Jane Ambachtsheer, who became BNP’s Global Head of Sustainability earlier this year. The move comes just eight months after he left Barclays to join climate think-tank Carbon Tracker as Head of Research – a position in which he put out a report on the potential boom in European carbon prices. He will now be a member of BNPP AM’s Sustainability Research & Policy team, working within its Sustainability Centre. He will cover investment issues related to climate change and the energy transition, giving support to the firm’s portfolio managers and investment analysts. He will also help develop “a framework to identify and monitor climate-related risks across portfolios” and work with the Climate Action 100+ initiative to get portfolio companies to align with the Paris Agreement.

Dr. Axel Hesse, Head of ESG Integration at Metzler Asset Management, will leave the company by mutual agreement on March 31 March 2019. Hesse, who joined Metzler in 2016, wants to focus again on his own firm, SD-M GmbH, which runs a database of non-financial performance indicators. Metzler Managing Partner Gerhard Wiesheu said Hesse played a “decisive role” in the firm’s ESG integration and ESG reporting “and we are deeply indebted to him”.

Blake Pontius has been named Director of Sustainable Investing at William Blair Investment Management, a new role at the boutique firm. Pontius joined the firm as an Institutional relationship manager in 2005 and has been a portfolio specialist on the global equity team for the past eight years.

Tanate Phutrakul has been named to succeed Koos Timmermans as chief financial officer of ING, the Dutch finance giant with a focus on sustainability. Thai national Phutrakul is currently ING Group Controller, having joined ING in 1998 as managing director of ING Barings Securities Thailand.

The Catherine Donnelly Foundation, a Canadian grant-making body, has welcomed Mritunjay Sinha as Director of Finance & Investment, effective immediately. It describes Sinha, who will replace Desmond Wilson, as “a social entrepreneur-operator and an investor” who has supported large-scale micro-lending in rural India, and helped to established a co-operate with female enterpreneurs. In his most recent role with impact investment house Grand Challenges Canada, he has been working with asset owners and managers.Nick Robins, the former HSBC climate expert who is now with the Grantham Research Institute, has become a trustee of the Climate Bonds Initiative, according to a filing at Companies House. Robins, who joined the Grantham Institute in February 2018 as Professor in Practice for Sustainable Finance, is also Special Adviser on Sustainable Finance with UN Environment. Robins was co-founder of Investor Watch with Mark Campanale in 2009 that spawned Carbon Tracker. According to the Climate Bonds Initiative’s most recent accounts, filed in September, founder and CEO Sean Kidney stepped down as a trustee in September 2017.

Corporate governance expert Stephen Davis has become an Advisory Board Member at Arkadiko Partners, the new company co-founded by former Hermes Equity Ownership Services CEO Colin Melvin, according to his LinkedIn page. Davis, a former chairman of Hermes EOS and current trustee at ShareAction, is senior fellow and associate director of the Harvard Law School Programs on Corporate Governance and Institutional Investors and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He’s a co-founder of the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN).

Shira Pavis Minton, Ethics Counsel and Designated Agency Ethics Official at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is retiring from the agency after more than 20 years of federal service and nearly 10 years with the SEC.

Thomas Kostigen is joining New York-based communications firm JConnelly to head up its new corporate social responsibility arm. Kostigen is a former Bloomberg news editor and columnist for Discover, USA Today and Wall Street Journal Digital Network and will be based in Los Angeles.

Ted Eliopoulos has been named as vice-chairman of Morgan Stanley Investment Management and head of strategic partnerships. He was formerly Chief Investment Officer at CalPERS.

Jessica Williams has started a new position as a Portfolio Analyst at Columbia Threadneedle Investments for the EMEA APAC regions (Europe, Middle East and Africa & Asia Pacific). She was previously an ESG Analyst at Standard & Poor’s and has also worked at the Climate Policy Initiative and Inflection Point Capital Management.

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has named J. David Enriquez as the Head of Private Equity in the Bureau of Asset Management (BAM). He’s had stints at Rothschild, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns.

After the scandal, the job ad. After the resignation of Erik Solheim as head of UN Environment over an expenses scandal, the role has now been advertised with the UN saying it would “especially welcome applications from women candidates”. The post is being held on an interim basis by Joyce Msuya.