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Shareholders test their power with votes at Exxon, Chevron, BlackRock and McD’s

May 24, 2022

The Brief - Daily Insights into Impact Investing

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Featured: Proxy Preview

Shareholders test their power with votes at ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock and McD’s. It’s spring, and your fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love – or summer vacation. Shareholder activists are focused instead on taking on management with at least 60 resolutions that will come to a vote this week at the annual meetings of some of America’s biggest companies. Amazon alone faces a dozen resolutions today. And because shareholder resolutions are merely advisory, activists at some companies are turning to binding board elections. But last year’s heady wins for environmental, social and governance proposals are giving way to a more mixed record this year. The votes “are going to serve as a fundamental test of investor resolve on the material risks of the escalating climate crisis and the economy-wide drag on sustainable growth from systemic racial inequities,” Majority Action’s Eli Kasargod-Staub told ImpactAlpha. 

Featured: Institutional Impact

Tracing a line from the lack of diversity in asset management to the undoing of Roe v. Wade. ImpactAlpha contributing editor Imogen Rose-Smith used to keep a copy of William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” pinned to her cubicle wall. “The best lack all conviction,” the poet wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And here we are once again, Rose-Smith says. The U.S. Supreme Court’s expected overturning of Roe v. Wade reflects deeper problems with the place of women in the U.S., and the world, she argues. That includes how we choose to deploy and allocate capital in today’s economy. “Institutional investors, from venture capitalists to pension plans, as well as banks and other capital-market participants, bear some responsibility.”

Dealflow: E-Mobility

India’s M Auto raises $20 million for electric mobility-as-a-service in Africa. Investing in the low-carbon transition of Africa requires solutions to alleviate poverty and uplift local economies. Chennai-based M Auto, a manufacturer of two and three-wheel electric vehicles with its own network battery-swapping stations, secured the investment from the Africa Transformation and Industrialisation Fund. The fund aims “to accelerate Africa’s industrial transformation and ecological transition while creating jobs and lifting people out of poverty,” said ATIF’s Shegun Adjadi Bakari (for context, see "High fuel prices spur Africa’s transition to electric mobility"). 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

60 Decibels is hiring a remote senior business development manager… Eurosif is looking for an executive director… Morgan Stanley’s Global Sustainable Finance group is recruiting a vice president of products and solutions for the EMEA region, based in London… Boehringer Ingelheim seeks an impact investing manager… Accion Venture Lab is hiring an investment officer for Africa, ideally in Lagos… Generation Investment Management seeks an analyst for its growth equity team in San Francisco.

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