ICGN Global Stewardship Committee
ICGN Global Stewardship Committee, focused on fiduciary duties, shareholder rights, shareholder meetings, company monitoring, voting engagement and investment mandates.
Catherine McCall
Catherine McCall
Canadian Coalition for Good Governance
Committee Co-Chair
Catherine McCall is the Executive Director of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance. Representing Canada’s leading institutional investors, which collectively manage assets of approximately CAD $5 trillion, the Coalition’s mandate is to improve corporate governance, including as it relates to environmental and social matters, at Canadian public companies and to assist institutional investors in meeting their stewardship responsibilities. CCGG also engages in policy development and works toward the enhancement of the regulatory environment to best align the interests of boards and management with those of their investors. As Executive Director, Catherine is responsible, together with the Board of Directors, for setting the strategy of the organization, leading policy development and participating in CCGG’s board engagement program. She is a member of the Ontario Securities Commission’s Continuous Disclosure Advisory Committee
Peter Dervan
Peter Dervan
Manulife Investment Management
Pete is part of the ESG Team at Manulife Investment Management where his responsibilities include shepherding proxy voting policy and procedure, stewardship thought leadership, and sustainability reporting. Pete collaborates with investment professionals on proxy voting and engagement decisions, manages the proxy voting vendor relationship, drafts responses to regulatory and standard setter consultations, and develops content for PRI reporting and Manulife Investment Management’s separate stewardship and sustainable investment reports. Prior to his work at Manulife Investment Management, Pete was on the Proxy Voting Team at Fidelity Investments where he reviewed and executed voting decisions, engaged with issuers and developed voting policy.
Stephen Erlichman
Stephen Erlichman
Fasken
Steve has practised corporate and securities law throughout his career at major law firms in New York and Toronto, took a working sabbatical in 1998 as a principal at a private equity firm, and since 1999 has been a partner at Fasken, a law firm with over 750 lawyers in offices across Canada and in the UK and South Africa. Steve co-founded Fasken’s ESG & Sustainability group and spends substantial time on ESG matters. Steve has advised management, boards of directors and shareholders of public and private companies in various industries as well as investment dealers, commercial banks, insurance companies, private equity firms and managers of mutual funds, pension funds and hedge funds. From 2011-2018 Steve also was the Executive Director of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, whose members are institutional investors across Canada which collectively have over C$5 trillion of assets under management. In 2021 Steve also became Chair, ESG at Middlefield Limited, a Canadian asset manager.
Steve has spoken and written widely, and has been interviewed by television, radio, magazine and newspaper reporters, on many corporate, securities and ESG topics (including director/shareholder engagement, impact investing and ESG disclosure). Steve authored a 200-plus page report commissioned by the Ontario Securities Commission entitled “Making it Mutual: Aligning the Interests of Investors and Managers – Recommendations for a Mutual Fund Governance Regime for Canada”, which was referred to by the press as a “landmark report on fund governance” and utilized by the Canadian Securities Administrators in establishing a fund governance regime for Canada. The press have called Steve’s writings “insightful” and “prescient” and have referred to Steve as one of “Canada’s top M&A attorneys”, “a leading practitioner in the Canadian fund industry” and “a leading governance expert”. Global Proxy Watch named Steve one of the “10 people around the world who have had the most impact on corporate governance” in 2016. Steve is a director of Canada’s Responsible Investment Association (“RIA”), a member of ICGN’s Global Stewardship Committee and a director and former President of the Harvard Business School Club of Toronto, and was a member of ICGN’s Shareholder Rights Committee as well as the inaugural co-chair of ICGN’s Global Network of Investor Associations.
Steve has law degrees from University of Toronto and New York University and an M.B.A. from Harvard University and holds the RIA’s Responsible Investment Professional Certification and the certificate in Sustainable Capitalism & ESG from UC Berkeley Law.
Caroline Escott
Caroline Escott
Railpen
Caroline is Senior Investment Manager at RPMI, the in-house investment manager for the Railways Pension Scheme. She leads Railpen’s stewardship and corporate governance work across the £32bn global portfolio.
She was previously in charge of the investment, stewardship and collective engagement programme at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (PLSA). Prior to this, she was Head of Public Policy at the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF).
She is also a Trustee Director at the Standard Life Master Trust pension scheme, winner of Investment Week’s “Investment Woman of the Year 2019” award and was one of Financial News’ 2020 “Top 25 Rising Stars of Asset Management in Europe”. She is also Vice-Chair of NextGen, an industry organisation which seeks to promote greater cognitive diversity in the pensions and investment industry.
She has a Master’s degree (with Distinction) in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics, where she graduated top of her year, and holds the Investment Management Certificate (IMC).
Andrew Gray
Andrew Gray
AustralianSuper
Andrew Gray – Director ESG and Stewardship, AustralianSuper – Andrew has around 30 years experience in the investment industry beginning with an investment research role at JBWere/Goldman Sachs which evolved to include research on ESG issues as they relate to investment. Andrew joined AustralianSuper in 2011 and since that time has been responsible for developing Australian Super’s ESG and Stewardship approach in its investment portfolio. As part of this role, Andrew considers issues such as board effectiveness, remuneration, climate change, work force and diversity and how they impact on AustralianSuper’s investments. Andrew also oversees AustralianSuper’s voting on its listed equity holdings and engagement program with company boards.
Bram Hendriks
Bram Hendriks
Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check
Bram Hendriks is specialized in corporate governance and global shareholder litigation. He was the co-chair of ICGN’s Shareholder Rights Committee from 2011-2021 and has substantial experience with developments in the area of shareholder rights and shareholder stewardship globally. Mr. Hendriks currently works as European client relations manager for the law firm Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP. In this capacity he advises European institutional investors about U.S. class action litigation as well as securities litigation in Europe and Asia. Before joining the law firm Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check he worked as corporate governance specialist for APG Asset Management and NN Investment Partners.
Sheila Stefani
Sheila Stefani
TPT Retirement Solutions
Sheila is the Responsible Investment Manager at TPT Retirement Solutions representing over 400,000 members from 2,600 employers with assets under management in excess of £14bn (as of 30 September 2021).
Sheila leads on ESG integration across multiple asset classes and stewardship reporting at TPT Retirement Solutions for both the DB and DC schemes.
Previously Sheila worked at the Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board as Senior Stewardship Analyst with special focus on corporate governance and ethical investment, Minerva Analytics as Stewardship Manager and at EIRIS Vigeo as Principal Research Analyst leading on ESG frameworks for emerging markets, private equities, sovereign bonds, and Precious Metals and Mining.
Danielle Melis
Danielle Melis
Independent Board Member
Danielle currently holds a position in the Board of General Pension Fund STAP, a financial institution founded by Aegon in 2016. In addition to this board position, Danielle holds various non-executive board positions. She is a member of the Supervisory Board of Triodos Bank NV, member of the Supervisory Board of the Pension Fund for Medical Specialists (SPMS), member of the Supervisory Board of Kempen Capital Management Investment Funds, and member of the Supervisory Board of Blue Sky Group Holding.
Danielle started her career in the financial sector where she worked for MeesPierson, NIBC and Rabobank. She obtained an MBA and Ph.D from Nyenrode Business University. Her dissertation was titled: “The Institutional Investor Stewardship Myth”. From 2009 until 2017, Danielle was a member of the core faculty of Nyenrode Business University teaching corporate governance in various degree and executive programs. She was the Academic Director of the Nyenrode New Board Program and Chair of the Nyenrode Corporate Governance Insititute and led various research teams for compliance research studies on behalf of the Monitoring Committee of the Dutch Corporate Governance Code. In 2017 Danielle became a Senior Fellow with the International Center for Financial law & Governance, the multidisciplinary research institute of Erasmus School of Law. In 2018, Danielle was appointed member of the Disciplinary Council of the Dutch Securities Institute (DSI), a foundation, founded in 1999 by the financial sector itself, with covenants and agreements with the Financial Markets Authority (AFM) and the Dutch Central Bank, with the aim to review certified individuals for integrity, knowledge and professional expertise.
In 2013, Danielle received the ICGN Deloitte Scholarship. Since 2014, she is a member of the ICGN Shareholders Responsibilities Committee. In 2018-19 the charter signatories to the Best Practice Principles for Shareholder Voting Research & Analysis (the BPP Group) appointed Dr. Danielle Melis Ph.D as independent Chair to finalize the Review of the operation of the Principles and to steer the Group through the implementation stages of the EU Shareholder Rights Directive.
Noah Wortman
Noah Wortman
Pogust Goodhead
Noah joined PGMBM in October 2021 as Director - Global Collective Redress and splits his time between Philadelphia and London with a global remit covering North America, the UK and Europe, Australia and Asia.
Most recently, Noah was Senior Manager, Collective Redress at Omni Bridgeway where he worked with global institutional investors to implement litigation funding strategies to aid in exercising their shareholder rights in seeking legal redress from publicly listed companies where alleged wrongdoing had occurred.
Previously, Noah was Managing Director, Americas and Global Head of Class Action Services for London-based Goal Group. There he was responsible for the company’s operations and strategic vision in the Americas and led the company’s worldwide initiatives in securities and antitrust class action litigation services on behalf of its global institutional investor clientele.
Before joining Goal Group, Noah served in similar roles at Stewarts Law as Director of Case Development of Investor Protection Litigation and at Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP helping global institutional investors exercise their rights to recover for their investment losses pursuant to securities laws in jurisdictions around the world.
Noah is a frequent speaker around the globe on the topic of shareholder legal redress, recovery, rights and responsibilities. He has also been a member of several leading global institutional investor organizations and has sat on the International Corporate Governance Network’s former Shareholder Responsibilities Committee, the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute’s Event Advisory Board, and the Council of Institutional Investors’ Markets Advisory Council.
Noah attended Columbia University and the Albert A. List College of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Robert Lewenson
Robert Lewenson
Old Mutual Investment Group
Robert joined the Old Mutual Investment Group Responsible Investment team in October 2014, as a Governance and Engagement Manager. He is responsible for proxy voting and engagement, representing Old Mutual Investment Group on various industry bodies and championing responsible investment for the OM group. Robert’s legal and corporate governance background enables him to bring his knowledge of law and negotiation skills to the fore in promoting clients’ interests. Prior to joining the Responsible Investment team, he was a legal advisor at Old Mutual Investment Group for seven years. Robert has fourteen years of work experience in the legal profession and asset management industry. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the ICGN. He holds a BBusSci LLB (UCT) and is an Attorney of the High Court.
