Savva, Rafael (2023) Governing Shareholder Engagement to Promote Corporate Sustainability : Demanding from Old Dogs New Tricks? In: UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Operating in the shadow of institutional shareholders’ duties, the rules enacted in transposition of the SRD II and in response to the Law Commission’s recommendations alongside the 2020 Stewardship Code bring about the regulation of their engagement with investee companies. Together with regulation adopted to regularise sustainable finance, this ‘regulation for shareholder stewardship’ is aimed at ensuring institutional shareholders’ engagement will be informed by matters relevant to corporate sustainability and be used to mainstream decision-making conducive to it. This paper focuses on the normative imperative about shareholder engagement radiating from the law relevant to its regulation following the foregoing developments, since there is reason to believe the law may impress on institutional shareholders that they should engage regularly to this end only in specific circumstances. The paper opines the law gives scope for shareholder engagement to be periodic and promotive of corporate sustainability. Yet the only sign of it encouraging this standard resides with the application of the foregoing regulation in discharge of the expectations policymakers endeavour to set on institutional shareholders through them. The expectations chime how action signalled by the pursuit of creating shareholder value can indirectly uphold investee companies’ longevity and social welfare. Yet contemplating engagement to be undertaken in the vigour of it offers a proxy for indorsing corporate sustainability mainly when it can evidently create the said value. The appeal of finding such a ‘business case’ for assenting to corporate sustainability is intuitive, but it can prove being at odds with its multifaceted prognostications.