On-demand Webinar: Good citizens? Analysing corporate behaviour in the context of COVID-19

Get access to this on-demand webinar where our panel of experts looked at how COVID-19 has impacted corporates' & investors' commitment to ESG, and whether ESG ratings are proving indicators of greater resilience during the crisis.

On this webinar expert speakers discussed:

  • What are the expectations of firms in the current context? How should they be treating staff and customers?
  • Which firms and industries are demonstrating resilience in the crisis and how does that correlate with sustainability?
  • Is the current crisis distracting firms and investors from a commitment to ESG?
  • Previous crises have exposed holes in corporate governance and major accounting scandals. What are the warning signs investors need to look out for?

Expert speakers

Host: Leon Saunders Calvert Head of Sustainable Finance, Lipper and I&A Insights, Refinitiv

Leon Saunders Calvert runs the Sustainable Finance, Lipper and I&A Insights businesses for Refinitiv. The Sustainable Finance business provides Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) data to the financial community to support optimized capital allocation for long term sustainable outcomes. Lipper is a leading fund benchmarking platform which provides holdings and performance data on mutual funds and ETF’s. I&A Insights is Refinitiv’s thought leadership team focused on creating market insights around proprietary fundamental research, deal trends and fund market dynamics.
 
Leon is a Board Observer at TAB, an aggregator of crowdfunding and other online financial marketplace data to service financial professionals in this emerging asset class, an Advisory Board member of AidHub, a platform for NGO’s, charities and companies to manage and measure their social impact initiatives, and an Advisory Board member of HighCastle, who use blockchain technology to support the issuance and distribution of securities. Leon also provides pro-bono consultative advice to charities through the Pilotlight business executive program and through UnLtd's social entrepreneurs mentorship program.
 
He joined Thomson Reuters in 2007 and has held various roles, primarily in commercial management, as the Head of M&A and Capital Raising, EMEA Head of Banking & Research, and in content strategy, as the Global Head of the Deals, League Tables and Private Equity franchises. Before this he ran the research and data teams at Mergermarket, a provider of M&A intelligence to the advisory community, and he started his career as an M&A Analyst at an advisory boutique, Regent Partners. He has a Masters Degree in International Management and a BA Hons in Philosophy and Literature. He has had numerous articles published on film analysis through various film journals. Leon enjoys going to the gym, self defense classes, and running around after his two young children.

Chuka Umunna Lawyer & Politician

Chuka is a solicitor by profession. He studied English Law and French Law at the University of Manchester.  Thereafter, from 2002 until 2010 he practiced as a corporate employment lawyer for an international City law firm and then in London’s West End. He helped clients with their most challenging contentious, transactional (M&A etc) and advisory matters. His clients were businesses, large and small, international and domestic. His work involved providing advice across employment and employment litigation, industrial relations, remuneration and incentives, superannuation and workplace health and safety.

Following his election to Parliament as the Member of Parliament for Streatham in May 2010, Chuka served first as Shadow Minister for Small Business in HM Official Opposition and then as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills for four years from October 2011.

As Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills he was a leading advocate in parliament of the responsible capitalism agenda and how businesses can create shared value in society. He led the successful campaign against the takeover of AstraZenca by Pfizer to protect the UK’s science base.  He instigated the establishment of the Small Business Saturday campaign in the UK in 2013, which is now into its sixth year.  He also led trade delegations for business organisations to West Africa and China whilst in post.

He left the Shadow Cabinet in September 2015 and subsequently resigned the Labour whip to sit as an independent MP in February 2019 due to policy differences with the Labour leadership over Brexit, the economy, national security, and because of anti-Jewish racism in the party.

In June 2019 Chuka joined the Liberal Democrats and was immediately appointed to become the party’s Treasury and Business spokesperson, before being appointed in August 2019 as the party’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, also leading on international trade.  In this role he was an advocate of the liberal, rules-based international order established in the wake of the Second World War.

He stood as the Liberal Democrats’ candidate in the Cities of London and Westminster in the 2019 General Election, in which he was endorsed by The Economist and The Observer newspapers and by people from across the political spectrum including the former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Michael Heseltine.  Though he was not elected, whilst the Conservative MP lost 6.7% of their vote in the seat, he almost trebled the Lib Dem share of the vote increasing it by 19.6%.

Chuka served on the House of Commons Treasury (2010-11) and Home Affairs (2015-17) Select Committees, and chaired the All-Party Parliamentary Groups on EU Relations (2017-19) and on Social Integration (2016-19) during his time in the House of Commons.  He was appointed by the Home Secretary to the government’s Serious Violence Taskforce in 2018.

He was a leading figure in the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign during the 2016 EU referendum, and subsequently co-founded the People’s Vote campaign.  He has sat on the advisory boards of a number of UK thinktanks including the Progressive Centre UK, the Social Market Foundation and the Centre for Progressive Capitalism. He is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

He writes a weekly column for The Independent digital newspaper and has written for most of the major UK newspapers.

He is a patron of Crystal Palace Football Club’s Palace for Life Foundation and is a Performing Rights Society Foundation Ambassador.

Tessa Walsh Green/ESG Financing Editor, IFR, Refinitiv

Tessa Walsh is the Green/ESG financing editor for IFR at Refinitiv and is responsible for covering the rapidly-developing sector and producing a daily ESG briefing.


She made the move to sustainable finance after many years of international debt capital markets coverage and was previously global loan editor for LPC at Thomson Reuters. 

Andre Shepley Director of Environmental, Social & Governance Research, Truvalue Labs

Andre Shepley is the Director of ESG Research at Truvalue Labs, an AI technology firm that provides real-time ESG data alongside bespoke solutions. Prior to Truvalue, Andre spent over 7 years in equity research and trading across consumer, energy, and industrial sectors at UBS Investment Bank. Andre is a Masters of Science in Sustainability Management candidate at Columbia University and holds a B.A. in Economics from Pomona College where he was a member of the Hall of Fame Hampshire Honors Society.

 

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