We endeavour to exercise the voting rights in markets worldwide. By casting the votes at shareholder meetings, NN IP can influence matters such as director nominations, board quality and the remuneration policy, thereby playing an important role in the checks and balances of the companies it invests in. We encourage companies to adhere to internationally accepted corporate governance standards in addition to complying with local legal requirements. These standards include the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance and the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN)’s Global Governance Principles.
NN IP’s voting policies are available on the website and form the basis for all our voting decisions. These voting policies describe how we vote on standard resolutions at annual general meetings and extraordinary general meetings of our investee companies. NN IP has set up a customised voting policy for exercising the voting rights at shareholder meetings on behalf of client assets. Thereby we ensure that shareholder meetings worldwide are voted in line with our own voting policy framework.
The shareholder meetings of our Dutch holdings, companies where we own a larger percentage of outstanding share capital, companies that are on the engagement list and all companies that are held in the Sustainable Equity funds, are manually voted by an in‐house Proxy Voting Committee. Portfolio managers and analysts are represented in this committee in order to ensure a clear linkage between our voting activities and investment activities. In case we deviate from the voting policy, this is discussed and reviewed by the proxy voting committee.
NN IP has a separate voting policy that guides the voting considerations on behalf of NN Group’s proprietary equity portfolio. As this portfolio contains a limited number of holdings, these considerations are always applied on a case-by-case basis. All votes cast at shareholder meetings on behalf of proprietary and client assets can be reviewed on the website.