An ethical fund

Investment manager Grosvenor offers the only ethical KiwiSaver fund in New Zealand that is certified by the Responsible Investment Association of Australasia.

Joint chief executive and chief investment officer David Beattie says it now has about 10,000 KiwiSaver clients in ethical funds, whom Beattie describes as quite vocal, and in the past 12-18 months particularly on the issue of fossil fuel investments.

• Ethics on the ledger

• Monitoring those small deposits

• Sewing seeds of change

So 12 months ago they began the process of removing fossil fuel companies from their direct holdings. At the time Grosvenor was looking after 25 global stocks, 25 New Zealand and 35-40 Australian.

``We had to take 30 of them out,'' Beattie says.

They are not quite fossil fuel-free yet, but they are getting there.

Otherwise there are nine exclusions in Grosvenor's socially responsible investment (SRI) set-up, including nuclear power.

While still a small part of Grosvenor's business, from a cash-flow perspective its SRI funds have been growing at twice the rate of its other funds.

Despite those efforts, Grosvenor has still been caught up in a Radio New Zealand (RNZ) investigation that has found its non-SRI, default KiwiSaver scheme uses an Australian fund manager, Vanguard, that invests in cluster bombs, mines, nuclear arms and tobacco.

Beattie told RNZ he was not happy with the weapons and tobacco holdings and would give the fund manager 12 months to come up with a solution.