ESG policy on Private Equity offers more opportunities than restrictions

PGGM’s Responsible Investing policy has been implemented on September 1 2012. It applies both to companies and to funds. Existing contracts remain intact, but over time, the policy will cover all PGGM’s private equity investments due to the limited holding period of current investments. In this interview, Ruulke Bagijn describes PGGM’s “Sustainability Stairway”. “It has several steps that explain what we want to achieve when it comes to ESG matters. At the lowest level, those are minimum requirements that we set for companies and funds and then it steps up to practices that we expect and practices that we encourage.” Minimum requirements include those areas in which we do not want to invest, which excludes companies or markets on the basis of a clear, ethical framework which concentrates on two specific areas: weapons and human rights.

References

This article may be reproduced according to our terms of use with attribution (and link, if online) to www.tias.edu. To be cited as: “ESG policy on Private Equity offers more opportunities than restrictions”, Ruulke Bagijn, www.tias.edu, October 24, 2012.

Read more

PGGM Responsible Investing in Private Equity Policy

Author(s)

Ruulke Bagijn
Chief Investment Officer Private Markets, PGGM Investments