47 Members Of BlackRock's "Investment Stewardship Team"; Each Responsible For 500 Huge Corporations
So, yeah, color me skeptical about just how in-depth their commitment is going to be.
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With the annual proxy season set to kick off in earnest next month, when shareholders get a chance to confront corporate leaders, pressure is starting to build on BlackRock’s 47-person group known as the investment-stewardship team. Each member of the squad is responsible for as many as 500 companies, generating a workload so vast that it can be very difficult to probe too deeply, according to interviews with five current and former members of the stewardship team.
“BlackRock owes proper stewardship on each and every portfolio holding to its clients,” said Wolfgang Kuhn, a former Aberdeen Standard Investments fund manager who now works for responsible investment campaign group ShareAction. “It's doubtful that 50 people can cope with that.” New York-based BlackRock said it takes “our role as a shareholder seriously,” adding that the firm voted against or withheld votes from 4,800 directors at 2,700 different companies last year. A spokesperson for the firm said investment stewardship is an “essential component of our fiduciary responsibility” and said the number of companies that each team member tracks is much less than 500.
“Given the groundwork we have already laid engaging on disclosure, and the growing investment risks surrounding sustainability, we will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures,” Fink wrote in a letter sent to clients in January.
BlackRock’s stewardship team, which it acquired in the 2009 purchase of Barclays Global Investors, is the biggest in the asset-management industry, and the company is planning to add to the group based on job postings on LinkedIn. The number of people employed in the unit has almost doubled from 26 in 2017.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/blackrock-s-vow-for-greener-planet-to-get-first-real-world-test?srnd=premium