The firm’s responsible investment head Shami Nissan speaks to Selin Bucak
Responsible investment is the buzzword in boardrooms these days. Private equity firms are joining the party, partly because of pressure from limited partners.
Actis, the emerging markets focused buyout group which manages $10bn in assets, integrated environmental, social and governance principles in its investment process about 15 years ago.
Shami Nissan, who joined the firm in 2014 as head of responsible investment, warns that with thousands of funds overseeing a multitude of companies in a diverse range of sectors just one wrong step could tarnish the reputation of the whole sector.
“If one underlying asset in one of these funds has some kind of issue or scandal, it will take a lot of the momentum out of the movement,” she says.
Actis was set up by the Commonwealth Development Corporation, and was spun out in 2004.
Since then it has raised $15bn and today employs 200 people across 17 offices. It has invested $10bn and has distributed $10bn to investors. Recent deals include a $180m investment in China-focused data centre specialist Chayora Holdings; and the acquisition of South Africa-based renewable energy business BioTherm Energy. Earlier this year, the firm also struck a deal to take over management of Abraaj’s funds in the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia.
In an interview with Private Equity News, Nissan discusses how to address supply chain problems at portfolio companies, the impact of Actis’ investments and diversity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
PEN: Considering the geographies you invest in, how do you make sure there aren’t critical social and governance issues?
SN: We are a huge investor in renewable energy generation which clearly contributes to climate change but some of our most difficult social and governance challenges are in those sectors.
You have a really large physical infrastructure being put in non-urban areas, so you’re already touching rural communities that tend to be much more impoverished and vulnerable. And environmentally the habitats are likely to be much more sensitive than if you’re building an office building in the heart of a city like Nairobi. You have to think about the social and environmental complexities.
If you look at Transparency International’s corruption perception index and look at our markets, there’s a high correlation. But we’ve had 14-15 years of really focusing on ESG issues including the risks. We have a really deep understanding of our sectors in our markets, so when we make a new investment, we don’t have to wonder what the five to 10 material things are that can blow up this investment. We know that because we’ve been doing it for years.
The responsible investment team that I run, for the infrastructure and energy deals we go and do site visits. We engage directly with management. We meet with the communities.
We’re not like some of those responsible investors that are looking for best-in-class ESG. Because if that was our remit, we’d have very few opportunities. So we can absolutely stomach some ESG shortfalls and lower standards, and in fact we embrace those as long as we know we have the tools to elevate standards. Then, that becomes our value creation opportunity as well.
PEN: How do you stay on top of any ESG issues?
SN: For every single energy investment, we essentially enforce that they hire a head of sustainability. Then there is a special subcommittee to the board, and those two things are really important for us given the social governance issues [that might exist].
And myself and the other senior member of my team are sitting on all of those subcommittees or chairing them. So we’ve got eyes and ears to the ground.
That is how we stay on top of the social governance risks and actively mitigate and manage [them], whether it’s a grievance, whether it’s a whistleblower allegation, or the workers aren’t happy because they want to be paid more. We know about it and we’re dealing with it and that’s our constant ongoing effort to minimise risks down all the time.
PEN: What would make you walk away from a deal?
SN: We have a real estate business. I mean, we would never do anything that required significant resettlement. We would never do anything impacting biodiversity in a high-risk way. When we’re in origination phase and we’re looking at a potential investment with a potential owner, the kind of things that would make us walk away is if we’re not comfortable with the modus operandi of the current owners. We always do due diligence that looks at reputational risk, how they have come to be in the position. What’s their level of political exposure, how did they secure operating licences? Is there any suggestion of improper conduct to get those green lights?
PEN: Have you been looking into potential harassment issues as well and how do you address them at portfolio companies?
SN: A proper due diligence includes legal due diligence of course and we do see that where allegations like that have crossed the domain into legal disputes. We ask for any kind of intelligence on sensitive issues to do with discrimination in the workplace, and also just labour conditions.
That’s one of the different types of allegations that come my way; anything from wanting to get paid more, feeling mistreated, or some in the bucket of sexual harassment. We have a standard guidance on these, that are immediate things to do in the aftermath of such an allegation being raised, because it’s really important what you do and you don’t do things like immediately fire that person that’s been accused.
You have to be very careful about what you do. Also how quickly you isolate people and information and servers to do a proper investigation. We codified it.
PEN: How do you make sure there aren’t any labour issues or human rights violations in the supply chain?
SN: For energy, infrastructure and real estate, your main supply chain is actually the construction workforce that’s used during the construction phase. We do a lot of work in this area. We had some experiences especially in India where your typical construction site in non-urban India can be challenged in terms of labour conditions.
So what we’ve sort of done to safeguard ourselves from those types of breaches with one of our companies called Ostro, is we developed labour accommodation guidelines based on (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) guidance, to really encapsulate in one document what the expectations are, in terms of providing clean drinking water, areas of rest in the shade, the right number of hand basins for hygiene and washing, making sure they have adequate toilets and if it’s a camp there is adequate ventilation, light, spacing in terms of how many people we can have.
We took away that ambiguity and it was quite big step up than what you would otherwise get.
We’ve had to make similar interventions in Latin America around labour conditions, more linked to the grievance channel. Workers need to be able to raise issues without retribution. So under our contract you have to have a grievance channel.
PEN: What kind of impact did you have with Ostro?
SN: We created Ostro in 2014. We felt really strongly that there was a huge market for renewables and at the time a lot of people had negative experiences investing in India. So perhaps we went a bit against the grain here, but we really wanted to push the renewables agenda because the costs had come down so dramatically, and we didn’t really see a business in the market that we felt we could back, so we took a bold step at the time.
We created it from scratch, we handpicked our management team and when we exited in 2018, at the time it was the largest renewables deal done in India. It had over 1GW of installed capacity. We built a company with the highest ESG standards. It achieved ISO certification for environmental management. It achieved OHSAS certification for health and safety management.
PEN: Any environmental issues you needed to address?
SN: On the one side it was very close to the habitat of a critically endangered bird called the Lesser Florican. We did a lot of work on relocating turbines to minimise the impact on the bird, we had to be very sure that we were not going to affect them.
There is also a protected animal called Blackbuck we had on a lot of our sites. We had to do things like train the workforce that came from other states in India who might have otherwise been hunting it to sort of identify it. By the way, you could go to jail for seven years if you harm the Blackbuck, so lots and lots of work done in really quite tricky areas.
The last area was that we always have community investment strategies for all of our energy businesses because the social license to operate is so key in our markets. If you don’t win the support and the hearts and minds of the communities in close proximity to the projects, you can suffer some serious business continuity issues and also your communities are quite often your workforce anyway, so that kind of makes things more complicated.
We discovered in Northern India and Rajasthan that there’s actually a massive healthcare problem linked to fluorosis, which is fluoride poisoning, due to high fluoride levels in the ground water.
We clearly had to focus on this healthcare issue, so we did some research and we invested in solar powered water filtration machines.
PEN: What are you doing to address diversity at Actis?
SN: We’re rolling out unconscious bias training to every single Actis staff member. For the first time in September we also rolled out unconscious bias training to about 10 of our portfolio companies, to the C-suite.
Next month we will be rolling out a mentorship programme for portfolio company staff. It’s a pilot programme and we’re starting with Africa. We are engaging with the CEOs to identify and nominate two mentees from their companies. But the mentees must be diverse, according to any dimension, including gender, ethnicity, age.
This is a deliberate diversity and inclusion strategy, it’s not just a generic mentorship programme for talent. We’re selecting that population of people that we now know from all the data and reports, are far less likely to benefit from this type of support organically in their organisations.
We also started looking at our relationships with our search firms, so they are now required to work harder to present balanced shortlists. We are also targeting female and diverse candidates as part of our associate outreach program. Other than gender we really focus on socio-economic background. So, rather than going to the same three or four MBA schools that we always go to, we’re now going to a bigger set and most importantly we’re going to the ones in our markets. So like the top school in India.
Source: Private Equity News