In brief: Article 9 helps, says PGGM, but isn’t mandatory

Dutch pension investor PGGM, which has assets worth €231 billion, has mixed views on how useful the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation is for private equity.

Being Article 9 could help an impact fund secure a slice of PGGM’s 5 percent impact allocation, senior investment manager Maurice Klaver told delegates at New Private Markets’ Impact Investor Global Summit. This is “because they’re more developed in the way they think about impact and how they get the data to prove it, both on the positive side and negative impact. But it isn’t a hard requirement for us.” The pension’s private equity allocation is invested with 100 fund managers, only one of which is an Article 9 fund.

But Klaver’s priority is gathering ESG data across PGGM’s entire private equity portfolio, he added. “The ESG Data Convergence Initiative was helpful, but then the SFDR came along and now we need to follow up on 16 KPIs for 5,000 portfolio companies with 100 managers. It’s a nightmare,” said Klaver. “I’m not sure it’s really helping [investors] do more sustainable investments.”