Alcyone Finance adhère à l’Access to Medicine Index

Press release from the Access to Medicine Index

Amundi Asset Management joins over twenty-five leading investment firms in signing the Access to Medicine Foundation Investor Statement

5 october 2010

Growing number of high profile endorsements suggests global health is becoming an emerging theme in investor assessments of pharmaceutical companies and is now an established part of the responsible investment landscape.

Alcyone Finance, Northwest Ethical and Dexia AM have joined global giant Amundi Asset Management as the latest financial institutions to become  signatories to the Access to Medicine Index.  These companies join several other leading institutional investors which have signed the Foundation’s investor statement this year, including Hermes, Robeco and Boston Common. To date, 27 worldwide investors have pledged their support for the Access to Medicine (ATM) Index, including original signatories such as Henderson, Aviva, F&C and PGGM. The signing of Alcyone, Northwest, Dexia AM and the IDEAM -Amundi Group brings the combined assets under management that have backed the Index to USD 3.3 trillion.

The Investor Statement expresses support from institutional investors in the efforts of the ATM Index to seek improved disclosure from the pharmaceutical companies on the access to medicine challenge. Many investors signing the statement are looking for big pharma to ensure it has fully considered the risks and opportunities associated with the access to medicine issue. By taking management of this issue into account, alongside other key ESG and financial issues, the investment community can better assess the long-term investment value of such companies when making investment choices. The ATM Index aims to shed light on company management structures, policies and performance across a range of ATM criteria.

« The endorsement from these companies indicates that important progress is being made towards including global health among other ESG factors, said Wim Leereveld, founder of the Access to Medicine Foundation, “Increasing support from leading responsible investors points to growing recognition among the investment community for the potential for global health factors to impact the financial performance of companies.”

« The Access to Medicine Index independently assesses how leading pharmaceutical companies perform in promoting universal access to medicine issues, said Tegwen Le Berthe, senior sustainability analyst at IDEAM – Amundi Group, “We value the detailed information and benchmarking analysis provided by the Index on this increasingly important issue.”

The Access to Medicine Foundation is an international, nonprofit organization based in the Netherlands. The foundation publishes the Access to Medicine Index, the first Index of its kind to provide standardized information on pharmaceutical companies with regard to their efforts to improve global access to medicine. The Foundation is funded by several governmental and non-governmental organizations including Oxfam Novib, Cordaid, Icco, Hivos, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK Department of International Development (DFID) and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Foundation’s research partner is RiskMetrics ESG Analystics, part of MSCI Inc a global provider of investment decision support tools.

Source : Access to Medicine Index Press Release

Download the investor statement