APG has published a Stewardship Overview for 2022 highlighting the voting and engagement activities it carried out on behalf of its clients last year.
This overview shows the breadth and depth of the stewardship activities that APG carries out on behalf of its pension fund clients and highlights how important these are. It explores engagements in a range of asset classes and markets all over the world. APG also looks at these activities in the context of its clients’ focus themes, such as climate and biodiversity, and, for example, on various topics relating to human rights. Finally, the overview highlights the different types of engagement activities that APG is involved in, ranging from encouraging individual companies to improve their ESG performance, to working with other investors and stakeholders to set market standards and establish best practice. This overview documents how the pension investor implements its clients’ responsible investment and voting policies in practice, through a collaborative process involving investment teams and responsible investing experts, and reports on the outcomes of these activities.
Multiple benefits
“Making the outcomes of our stewardship activities more visible and continuing to build on our reporting efforts has multiple benefits,” says Anna Pot, Head of Responsible Investment Capital Markets & RI Communications. “It enables us to assess whether our time and effort are well spent, promotes change by helping to shape best practice and supports our collaborative investor efforts. Equally important, it allows our clients and their participants to see how their policies are implemented and pension money is invested. This report is a further step in the process of making our activities more transparent and tangible and showing the progress we have made towards our goal of creating a better and more sustainable future.”
As an institutional investor, APG is required to be transparent about the activities it carries out on behalf of its clients. Under the Dutch Corporate Governance Code, APG is obliged to report annually on how it implements its engagement policy and the key points of dialogues with companies/investments. In terms of voting, APG and its clients disclose all their voting activity on their websites. Furthermore, APG also reports on any significant votes, for example, in companies where it has a large position, or which have a high media profile.