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In a 2020 letter to the chief executives of all the world's banks, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink wrote that: “The climate transition presents a historic investment opportunity”. The letter, in which the world's largest asset manager outlined the next steps towards a net zero world, was picked up by leading news organisations such as The New York Times and NBC News, and was promoted across the internet, including on social media platforms. On the New York Times’ 2020 Facebook post about it, one user commented: "That's capitalism...it can work for good"; another said “Finally they figured it out”; and then there was one final comment which would sound positively prophetic today: "Thank you Mr Fink, please no greenwashing".

BlackRock is not alone in its greenwashing ploy. The German online retail leader Zalando and the French tyre giant Michelin’s combined CO2 emissions rival those of an entire nation like Algeria, and still, are marketed into “green” investments they market themselves as part of a “green and circular economy”. And this is just one example out of many other highly polluting companies, as we have shown in a previous article. If an asset manager promotes something as sustainable, can investors trust their broader claims of being a pioneer in sustainable investing? 

Such is the case of Eurizon, an asset manager which is controlled by Italy's largest bank Intesa SanPaolo, and invests in highly polluting companies with its supposedly green funds. However, the Italian financial institution is just one among many of its competitors using devious means to get their so-called ‘sustainable message’ across, as our investigation shows.

By running big green campaigns on their websites and participating in official sustainability events, big banks and other financial institutions are presenting themselves as the new saviours of the planet, while investing in the world's most polluting companies. However, their “green” investments tell a very different story. Our investigation, including a story of local activism, exposes this scaled-up greenwashing and disinformation operation and its contradictions.

For Riccardo Torelli, professor of Corporate Social Responsibility at Milan’s Cattolica University and co-founder of the Research Centre for Responsibility, Ethics and Sustainability in Management, there are two main ways to understand a business’ sustainability. “One way is [when] a company says ‘our business is sustainable’; here there is a whole brand identity issue where you can influence the perception of the end customer,” Torelli told Voxeurop. “Another way is [the] promotion [of] a single product, i.e. the company says ‘our specific product is sustainable’. Here the consumers or the investor might indeed have a different reaction because they know that in general, apart from that product, the company is not sustainable.”

But what happens when asset managers engage in a double greenwashing standard, both at the product level and the brand level? “The percentage of people who would end up being deceived would be very high,” predicted Torelli.

And that is exactly what is happening. In 2023, asset managers invested $87 billion in the world's most polluting companies through “green'” funds, as defined by the European regulation on sustainable finance. These funds are offered to clients with green claims such as “sustainability”, “clean energy”, “net zero”, while $18 billion is invested in high carbon emitting companies and almost $7 billion in fossil fuel companies. 

Asset managers are not alone in using eco-labels to market financial products that are far from climate-friendly. But while they are promoting such misleading products, they are also flaunting a general corporate sustainability policy. Conscious investors therefore need to be wary of the corporate marketing of financial institutions, which our previous analysis has shown can manipulate perceptions to make them believe they are committed to a sustainable transition, when their individual products prove the opposite.

As a recent European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) survey on the implementation of the European regulation on sustainable finance shows, financial players have been riding the sustainable finance wave more as a way to adopt sustainability-related marketing strategies than to make truly sustainable investments.

According to 79% of financial market participants, including asset managers and advisors who responded to ESMA's questionnaire, the regulation is being used as a marketing tool, while its ultimate objective, according to the European Commission, is to "attract private finance to help Europe make the transition to a net-zero economy".

We have analysed how the top 10 asset managers investing in the world's most polluting companies through their 'green' funds are greenwashing themselves to the public on sustainable investment issues.

Corporate websites’ green spin 

One way of doing it is getting the buy-in of the mainstream influential media. "We believe that the best kind of sustainable investment is one that is shaped around you," goes the JP Morgan website, directly addressing browsing investors; more than four billion dollars are invested in the world's most polluting companies through JP Morgan’s "green" funds. In June 2021, the "Adviser" section of British newspaper the Financial Times published an article entitled: "JP Morgan launches three sustainability funds".

According to this article, one of the funds promoted, the Global Sustainable Equity fund, would exclude investments in "unsustainable" sectors. "The climate change solutions fund is designed to help investors intelligently capture innovative investment opportunities and technologies facilitating the low carbon transition," the article continued. A second way to get disinformation across is to ensure the message is hammered home across social media sites. Financial Times Adviser then reposted the article on its social media pages. 

Today, that fund invests nearly $20 million in the automotive companies Bridgestone, Burlington, Ross Stores and Stellantis, which together generate total average annual emissions of 360 million tonnes of carbon.* 

The disinformation-fuelled explanation for these investments can be found on X (formerly Twitter), published by the channel CNBC Middle East at the height of Cop 28 in Dubai. In a video which has been viewed nearly 19,000 times, the broadcaster interviewed Chuka Umunna, Global Head of Sustainable Solutions at JP Morgan, who explained: "It's not our job to boycott any sector, it's our job to work with clients to decarbonise". 

The way the message is spread matters. Riccardo Torelli told Voxeurop: “The way in which customers receive information, whether informally through a social [media] channel or formally through a press release or an interview with a senior executive, has a major impact on the credibility of the information. The company's communication is of such importance that it greatly influences whether or not a high or low perception of greenwashing is created in the receiving party”.

To add a human dimension to their communication, a third way is to publish videos on their websites of CEOs talking about sustainability. "We manage to invest our money on behalf of our clients in the most sustainable way possible," says Saverio Perissinotto, chairman of Eurizon Capital SGR, which in 2023 will have 2.3 billion "green" investments in the world's most polluting companies, including almost 900 million in 17 of the world's biggest CO2 emitting fossil fuel companies. 

Click on an image to see the worlds' main asset managers' "green" funds homepages.

The asset manager controlled by Italy's largest bank, Intesa SanPaolo, had already been enjoying positive coverage in a number of Italian newspapers throughout 2019. The Italian daily Il Foglio, for example, published an interview by the Italian news agency Askanews with Simone Chielini, who was then Head of ESG & Strategic Activism at Eurizon. The headline of the article, which was about the company’s sustainable investment strategy, was promising: “Eurizon: responsible finance to create value with sustainability”. The same interview with the same headline was republished by the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Later, in January 2020, La Stampa daily published a piece of sponsored content entitled “Sustainable growth when shared”, describing Eurizon's efforts towards environmental sustainability.

In 2017 Askanews, again, published a video on YouTube called "Eurizon's 'sustainable' choice", in which the head of sustainable strategies explains how a fund called "Sustainable Global Equity" invests in "companies with sustainable competitive advantages". In November 2017, the fund invested in Oil Search, at the time the largest oil and gas exploration company in Papua New Guinea (source LSEG); in automotive investments with French tyre giant Michelin; and today invests €3.5 million in the US-based agribusiness company Corteva, which emits almost 8 million tonnes of carbon per year.

Storebrand’s “green” view

Norway’s financial services company Storebrand has published a documentary style video on its website featuring the company's top management, including CEO Jan Erik Saugestad, who wears the UN Sustainable Development Goals pin on his jacket. In the video, called “The House has a View”, Saugestad explains that the bank started looking at sustainable finance in the mid-1990s: "At that point in time I think it is fair to say that that was a space occupied by NGOs and really engaged people. The finance industry was not really looking in that direction. We established Storebrand Asset Management to see, can we develop solutions that can provide a sustainable investment vehicle". In 2023, the company invested $1.5 billion in the world's most polluting companies through its green funds, including nearly $6 million in Norwegian shipping company Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics through Storebrand Norge Fossilfri, a “fossil-free” fund. 

In 2021 ESG Today, a website covering sustainable and green issues for investors, dedicated an article to the hiring of Storebrand's new Head of Sustainable Investments, Kamil Zabieski. The article praises Storebrand, mentioning how it has been a leading voice among investment managers in promoting sustainability and using its position to make a difference. "In June 2020, for example, the firm led a group of 30 investment managers to call on Brazilian authorities to take action to end deforestation," the author writes. Storebrand, however, continues to like Brazilian oil. In fact, in 2023, it invested $2.4m in state-owned Petrobras, which will continue massive oil production in the country in the coming years.

Then there is Amundi, which also calls itself "a pioneer and leader in responsible investment". For example, its dedicated Bioenergy ESG fund invests almost $8 million in fossil fuels companies ENI and TotalEnergies.* The Luxembourg-based asset manager is taking part in a pot-pourri series of funds that string together many sustainability-linked elements, such as Amundi's ESG Climate Net Zero Ambition, which invests in a large portfolio of carbon-intensive and polluting brands, including Spanish fast-fashion company Inditex (owner among others of the brands Zara, Masimo Dutti, and Bershka), but also Michelin, Toyota and several fossil fuel companies. In the last quarter of 2023, Amundi invested $1.4 billion in the world's most polluting companies through ESG-labelled funds.*

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On its website, Amundi boasts about the awards it has won for its ESG investments. In 2022, for example, it was named "Best ESG Investment Fund" at the ESG Investing Awards, organised by ESG Investing, a media platform where “fund managers, institutional investors and listed companies” get “news and features on ESG and sustainable investing”. We contacted the organisers of the awards to find out what the award criteria were, which Amundi ESG funds had won in particular, and whether they were aware of Amundi's highly polluting ESG investments, but they did not respond. However, Amundi used the award to promote itself on the social media platform X: "Amundi is proud to have been awarded twice by the #ESG Investing Awards 2022, with two prestigious prizes".

“These strategies cover all of the attention spans of a person, from pinpointing their identity, which is the highest level, or corporate communication, to get to the lowest level, the product itself (i.e. the fund to invest in), and also those in between,” says expert Riccardo Torelli. The form of this latter can have very different formats and “include all the PR and sensational elements, such as awards, appearances at events, interviews, articles, all of which serve to confirm the strategy of the companies. All of this adds up to a perfect storm to convince investors of the virtues of asset managers”. In the previous chapter of this investigation, we exposed the failure of journalism to point out the role of asset managers in the greenwashing of big polluters.

From the field: Debunking greenwashing at BlackRock’s “sustainability summits” 

In stark contrast to the media coverage, social media videos and posts which are put out there to greenwash the truth about big funds, a small grassroots organisation from Ohio, in the United States, is using the power of community gathering to push back on the viral elements of this greenwashing disinformation.

At the Cleveland Sustainability Summit on 23 January 2024, Kaitlin Bergan, head of Sustainable Client Solutions at BlackRock, was invited to give the opening keynote speech entitled: “Investors Making Sustainable Impact”. But not everyone was listening to her address at the Huntington Convention Center.

“When we learned that BlackRock was going to be the keynote speaker, we felt there was something deeply wrong,” said Craig Ickler, Energy Democracy Organiser at Cleveland Owns, an economic democracy incubator that builds cooperative businesses and leads campaigns for community control of resources. “These ESG policies that BlackRock promotes maintain the same power structures, the same people who got us into this climate mess,” he told Voxeurop. “Keeping them at the wheel and asking them to emit less carbon will not work. We couldn’t stand by seeing a false solution like this to the climate crisis happening in our community. And [we] couldn't let the narrative be only that. These top-down solutions are implemented by investment bankers who live hundreds or thousands of miles away, and control how to run our communities.” 

And that's how Cleveland Owns, together with other local organisations, rented a room in the same conference centre at the same time as BlackRock's keynote speech. “A diverse group of folks from the conference started showing up at our event. It was good to have them with us and hear an alternative to what BlackRock was talking about,” Ickler explained. Their discussion focused on the city's problems and real sources of change: “We didn’t just show the problem with ESG finance, but also discussed the concrete alternative."

Ickler explained that his organisation uses a consortium to democratically decide how to lend funds to sustainable, non-extractive local businesses, a debt which they can only start paying off once they begin making a profit. “We provide those funds to local communities who have been historically disadvantaged, and we continue to support their business plan. And beyond the loan, we help them with documents and support them with ideas.”

Across the convention centre, BlackRock, which through its subsidiaries has $6.3 billion in "green" investments in the world's most polluting companies, explained how investors can make a sustainable impact. Its investments in those companies amount to $3.8 billion through funds with sustainability labels, contributing to emitting 18 million tonnes of CO2*.

Neither the summit organisers nor BlackRock ever reached out to the local organisations for a discussion, but Ickler said their presence made an impact and contributed to a positive change in thinking, especially with conference participants joining their session. “They eventually told us that our initiative [had] changed their perspective on the rest of the conference; viewing the problem through different lenses, meaning that there is another way this can happen; thinking about this when they're watching these big banks and other big institutions, and start asking, where is the community voice?” concludes Craig Ickler.

*Data from the last quarter of 2023, extracted from the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

Stefano Valentino is a Bertha Challenge Fellow 2024. This article is part of an investigation coordinated by Voxeurop with the support of the Bertha Challenge fellowship. Alef Ferreira Lopez, data analysis assistant, PhD student in Economics, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, contributed to the data analysis.

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