What are the material issues the company has identified?

In its 2019 Corporate Sustainability Report Partners Group identified a range of material issues, such as financial performance, corporate governance and risk management, human capital development. Among these, promoting ethical business practices and compliance stands out as a key material issue for Partners Group.

Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards                        

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:

“The reporting organization shall identify its stakeholders, and explain how it has responded to their reasonable expectations and interests.”

Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.

Key stakeholder groups Partners Group engages with:

To identify and prioritise material topics Partners Group engaged with its stakeholders through the following channels:

Stakeholder Group	Method of engagement
Shareholders	·      Ongoing shareholder meetings ·      Semi-annual reporting ·      Annual General Meeting
Clients & beneficiaries	·      Ongoing client meetings ·      Ongoing updates via My Partners Group App & My Partners Group Portal ·      Daily, monthly or quarterly reporting ·      Annual General Meeting ·      Partners Group Academy workshops ·      ESG webinars
Portfolio companies	·      ESG on-boarding ·      Annual ESG KPI survey ·      Ongoing proprietary ESG operational improvement projects ·      ESG workshops ·      Incident reporting tool ·      PRIMERA Insight
Financial partners	·      Annual Partners Conference
Employees	·      Partners Group Intranet ·      Partners Group People employee portal ·      Bi-weekly Partners Group Forum ·      Annual performance and development reviews ·      Ongoing training and mentoring programmes
Regulatory bodies	·      Regulatory examinations and visits ·      Recurring audits ·      Ongoing reporting obligations

What actions were taken by Partners Group to promote ethical business practices and compliance?

In its 2019 Corporate Sustainability Report Partners Group reports that it took the following actions for promoting ethical business practices and compliance:

• Implementing a Code of Conduct
• Partners Group’s Code of Conduct summarises the key directives, policies, practices and values, including anti-corruption policies, which enable Partners Group to maintain high standards of business conduct. To make sure all employees are fully aware of the contents of the directives it summarises, Partners Group conducts targeted training and education sessions on those directives. On an annual basis, all employees globally, including all members of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee, are required to take and pass a number of online compliance training programmes to ensure these documents have been thoroughly understood.

• Investing in technology to promote legal and regulatory compliance
• In 2019, Partners Group’s Compliance team further invested in technology to enhance its services and support Partners Group’s growth. The team implemented a machine learning tool for reviewing the securities trading reports all employee are required to submit on a quarterly basis, and a new International Marketing Controls application. The application gathers data on international marketing activities from a range of sources, analyses it and flags potential issues for review, enabling the team to perform their monitoring and review activities in a more efficient and scalable manner. Additionally, following the introduction of a new online learning management system in 2018, the Compliance team continued to enhance the system in order to make Partners Group’s annual group-wide compliance training programme more user-friendly for employees. This included adding further audio and video support to the programme and providing an in-depth, interactive breakdown of Partners Group’s policies and directives. The new system also enabled the team to launch more frequent and personalised trainings throughout the year, specifically tailored to an employee’s function and jurisdiction.

• Increasing tax transparency
• In accordance with its Code of Conduct and its Charter, Partners Group seeks to act as a good corporate citizen, paying the correct amount of tax at the correct time. Partners Group aims to do this by making sure that it manages and reports its tax affairs in a manner that safeguards compliance with international tax guidelines and all applicable tax laws and obligations in each country in which Partners Group In order to further increase transparency on this matter, in 2019 Partners Group published its group-wide Tax Policy, explaining Partners Group’s approach to tax, tax governance and risk management, tax compliance, and its relationship with tax authorities.

Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?

The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 205-2 Communication and training about anti-corruption policies and procedures

Disclosure 205-2 Communication and training about anti-corruption policies and procedures corresponds to:

• Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
• Targets: 16.5

 

78% of the world’s 250 largest companies report in accordance with the GRI Standards

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References:

1) This case study is based on published information by Partners Group, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:

http://database.globalreporting.org/

2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/

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