NILGOSC exercises its voting rights, if possible, at all company meetings of its actively-managed equity holdings, referring to its bespoke Voting Policy to vote against management where there are significant ESG failings. Until now, NILGOSC has not had the opportunity to indicate a preference on how votes are placed on passively-managed equities held in the LGIM pooled funds; instead, relying on LGIM’s strong responsible investment credentials to cast votes according to its own voting policies.
Recently, LGIM has partnered with fintech firm Tumelo to provide clients with the option of expressing their voting preferences. Pass-through Voting (PtV) allows investors to have a say in how asset managers vote on the underlying listed equities in a fund (in proportion to the asset owners’ share of the holdings), meaning that the new service offering is providing LGIM’s clients with the opportunity to influence stewardship decisions in the passive pooled-fund investments.
Always keen to expand its stewardship of assets within the pension fund, NILGOSC has spent a number of months working alongside LGIM, Tumelo and NILGOSC’s corporate governance research provider Minerva Analytics, to establish an integrated solution, which will increase alignment of votes for as many of the Fund’s equities as possible.
NILGOSC is pleased to announce the launch of its use of the PtV solution, just ahead of 2025’s peak voting season kicking off (April to June 2025). Subject to some restrictions, PtV will help NILGOSC to vote consistently across the equities that it holds in both its actively managed mandates and in the passively managed funds.
Chief Executive David Murphy commented “We’re thankful to each of our three partners, LGIM, Tumelo, and Minerva Analytics for working together to help implement an integrated Pass-through Voting solution. NILGOSC seeks to improve corporate behaviour and protect shareholder value by maintaining effective shareholder oversight of the directors and company policies of the companies we’re invested in, and we’re very pleased to be able to implement our voting policy across more of our investments.”
