Aberdeen's Ditching of ESG Proves the Green Finance Revolution is Dead

The Chairman of the eco-obsessed investment giant has come out against "ridiculously extravagant claims" about "saving the world"

“When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” Samuel Johnson famously quipped. It would not be too much of a stretch to fit this to the case of the investment fund manager: nothing brings about the wonderful concentration of his mind so much as a combination of poor returns and the threat of legal suits.

In what reads like a parody, an article in the Telegraph this week cited the Chairman of investment giant Aberdeen Sir Douglas Flint telling a conference that fund managers had made “ridiculously extravagant claims” about “saving the world” instead of focusing on profits.

Our industry then made a kind of huge mistake, it became a marketing thing, let’s tell everyone we’re saving the world, we’re saving the planet… we’re not really about investing money, we’re just jolly good people and we’re saving the world.

Sir Douglas noticed that not only did the “saving the world” mantra distract fund managers from their fiduciary duties of maximising their clients’ returns, but it also exposed them to the threat of legal claims. He said that fund managers’ statements extolling “ESG” and “diversity” were now “in every search engine for a US litigation lawyer”, creating a potential “feast” for lawsuits.

If these observations are to pass as insightful comments by a seasoned denizen of the financial world, one might ask simply without seeming impertinent, “Where have you been, Sir Douglas, for the past three years?"