Overview of the quarter

Back in Chaucer’s day, a pilgrimage was the hot ticket. In these more modern times, it might be Wimbledon, the Chelsea Flower Show or Glastonbury. Henley, perhaps? Whatever floats your boat.

For the responsible investment team, however, the second quarter holds other delights. With the bulk of annual general meetings held between April and June, this is peak voting season.

Voting is very important for us – and for our clients. It allows us to express, on their behalf, our independent judgements on the various resolutions put forward by both management teams and shareholders. In this way, our votes can amplify the messages we convey directly to companies during our engagements throughout the year.

In this quarter’s Responsible Investment Report, we delve into the thinking behind our recent votes both for and against resolutions on a broad range of environmental, social and governance issues. These are complex topics, and our decisions are taken only after deep research and serious consideration by the responsible investment team, with input from other experts – both internal and external – where relevant. The companies whose votes we focus on in this report are Amazon, BP and Glencore.

As usual, we also give a full list of our engagements with companies over the quarter and provide more detail on some of the more noteworthy ones – this time, those with Volkswagen, steel giant ArcelorMittal and offshore drilling services supplier Noble.