9fin Featured Content

Albea — ESG QuickTake (9fin) (13/03/23)

TLDR: Beauty packaging group Albea has made progress in improving its sustainability practices, particularly in reducing its GHG emissions and increasing the recyclability of its plastic packaging. However, the company still has some way to go in meeting its plastic targets, and there are concerns about the sustainability of plastic manufacturing more broadly. Albea has work to do in maintaining gender diversity in management positions and reducing workplace accidents. 

Double and Dynamic Materiality (9fin Educational) (20/03/23)

TLDR: Double materiality acknowledges that materiality can extend further than what is financially material to a company (inward impacts) and encompass a business’ wider impact on the world (outward impacts). In fact, a company’s outward impacts often evolve into financially material inward impacts. This process is explained by the term dynamic materiality. In 9fin’s latest ESG Educational, using real HY examples (e.g., Teva, Amigo Loans, Orpea), we delve into the detrimental effects of ignoring double and dynamic materiality, how these concepts are interlinked, and sustainability standards’ diverging approaches to the topics.

ESG 9Questions — Julian Kölbel, University of St. Gallen (9fin) (16/03/23)

TLDR: In 9fin’s first ESG 9Questions, we sit down with Dr. Julian Kölbel, a leading professor of sustainable finance at the University of St. Gallen who has recently published a paper on sustainability-linked bonds which analyses the presence of a ‘greenium.’ Dr. Kölbel also discusses his work on ESG scoring and the elusive relationship between ESG and financial returns. 

HY Company News 

Impact of PPC’s Failure to Meet Sustainability-Linked Bond Targets Limited (16/03/23)

Public Power Corporation’s has failed to reach its end-2022 CO2-emissions reduction target (40% reduction from 2019 Scope 1 emissions) for its €775m sustainability-linked bonds (SLB). According to Fitch Ratings this will have “a limited negative impact on the company’s cost of debt or meaningful changes in the bondholder base and its pricing in the secondary market”. Fitch expects the main holders to factor in that PPC’s failure to meet its targets relied on a commitment to phase out existing lignite plants by 2023. However, energy security concerns due to the war in Ukraine have led to a temporary increase in lignite-fired electricity production and slowed the decommissioning of the plants.

US sues Rite Aid for allegedly missing ‘red flags’ in unlawful prescriptions (14/03/23)

The US government has sued Rite Aid, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy chains, for allegedly missing “red flags” when it knowingly filled unlawful drug prescriptions — including opioids and fentanyl — and ignored internal controls on its practices. In a complaint filed on Monday, the federal justice department asserted that Rite Aid “filled at least hundreds of thousands of unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances that were medically unnecessary, lacked a medically accepted indication, or were not issued in the usual course of professional practice” between 2014 and 2019.

News Stories 

ESMA advisory group call for caution on greenbleaching supervision (17/03/23)

In a call for evidence, members of the Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group (SMSG) were asked about “greenbleaching” — where managers understate the sustainability credentials of their products to avoid EU sustainability fund classification downgrades. SMSG cautioned against sanctioning firms that greenbleach, as there is no legal obligation to disclose how sustainable a product is and therefore understating sustainability credentials cannot be considered a ‘misrepresentation’. SMSG recommended ESMA continue to monitor occurrences of greenbleaching. 

Spring Budget 2023: Nuclear to be classed as sustainable in UK taxonomy (15/03/23)

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt used his Spring Budget to reveal the UK would class nuclear energy as environmentally sustainable in its green taxonomy, to give it access to the same investment incentives as renewables. The taxonomy was delayed by the UK government at the end of 2022 — at the time it was said that another year was needed clarify and put into law.

ESG Investors Largely in Dark on Value Chain Risks, Study Finds (15/03/23)

Roughly 60% of firms don’t report their supply-chain emissions, a review by CDP showed. Almost 70% have yet to assess the impact on biodiversity of their value chains, the nonprofit said on Wednesday. The data is based on the 18,500 companies that use CDP’s global system for reporting environmental impacts.

SVB Exposes ‘Lazy’ ESG Funds as Hundreds Bet on Doomed Bank (14/03/23)

About 915 funds registered under European Union regulations as either “promoting” ESG or declaring it as their “objective” are exposed — directly or indirectly — to SVB, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. For ESG investors, SVB appeared to tick several boxes. The bank was a big lender to renewable energy companies but when it came to governance risks, fund managers seem to have been less attentive, according to Bloomberg. On Tuesday, it emerged that SVB’s lack of a chief risk officer for much of last year is being examined by the Federal Reserve as part of its probe of the bank’s failure, two people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

ECB, Regulators Working on Climate Reporting Requirements for Structured Finance Products (13/03/23)

The European Central Bank and the European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) announced today plans to introduce new climate change-related disclosure requirements for structured finance products, aimed at enabling investors to better identify climate-related risks. Assets involved in securitisation transactions often include real estate mortgages or auto loans, which the ECB and ESAs said could be directly exposed to physical or transition-related climate risks. The ECB and ESAs also called on originators to collect data needed by investors to assess the climate-related risks of the products’ underlying assets, even in the current absence of mandatory disclosure requirements.