Legg Mason affiliate, Martin Currie, has been rewarded the top ESG rating for third year in a row by the Principles for Responsible Investments (PRI).
The firm was granted the highest performance band (A+) across all the three top-level categories including ‘strategy and governance’, ‘incorporation’ and ‘active ownership’.
This also moved the firm into the top quartile of the investment manager peer group for all aspects of the assessment.
David Sheasby, head of stewardship and ESG Martin Currie, said the company expanded its environmental, social, governance (ESG) toolkit in 2018 by adding the new ESG knowledge hub which contained an online directory of its all ESG resources.
At the same time, it created two proprietary tools: a portfolio dashboard offering the ESG profile of each strategy on MSCI ESG data and a framework for critically assessing aspects of corporate governance.
“We have also continued to place significant emphasis on collaborating towards global standards of sustainability best practice. As committed advocates of a unified approach to the treatment and inclusion of ESG disclosure and reporting, we have worked with various policy makers and standard setters in 2018 to help implement industry change,” Sheasby said.
“And for us, retaining our A+ PRI rating for a third-year running is clear evidence of stewardship being an integral part of our client proposition. Our firm-wide commitment to stewardship and differentiated approach to ESG were vital to achieving the top ratings in each category.”
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