Profile: Angus Forbes

When Angus Forbes saw the “green light” in 2007, he gave up his high powered London job to work for Prince Charles’ rainforest project, then decided to set up a green global equity fund in Australia to invest only in companies  which are dedicated to environmental principles and with a sustainable management commitment.

Last weekend Angus Forbes appeared on Sky Business Eco Report. This week saw him in Brisbane giving a lecture at the Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Griffith University.

Ken Hickson caught up with him to get a measure of the man on a mission.

Angus Forbes has turned green and he wants to encourage all business to do likewise.

As he said in an interview with the UK Sunday Times last month:

“Businesses that have a champion are what we are looking for — someone at the top who is passionate about the cause and is infecting the entire organisation with his passion. We want to invest in people who are thumping their desks trying to get their company to the top of the field on this issue.”

Green wasn’t always the colour of the money or the companies Angus was prepared to invest in.

Angus spent 20 years in London working with James Capel, Merrill Lynch and GLG Partners. At Merrill Lynch he led Scottish Institutional sales and then Hedge fund sales. Angus ran European research at GLG Partners before managing the Global Consumer fund 2003-07.

In early 2007, Angus launched the GLG Environment Fund and established the sustainability framework that has become the central approach of Natural Capital’s funds today.

In 2007, Angus was the inaugural Project Director of the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project at Clarence house in London. Angus was also Chairman of Burgopak, a packaging firm based in London, from 2002-07.

To get a good inside look at what Angus Forbes and his company Natural Capital is up to, we reprint here the full story by Kate Walsh in UK Sunday Times (13 December 2009):

IN his sharp suit, Angus Forbes looks every inch the archetypal hedge-fund manager, yet he is probably the closest the sector will get to a tree-hugger. The clue is in his green tie and cufflinks.

Forbes is co-founder of Natural Capital Funds Management, which invests in sustainable companies. The Australian-born 44-year-old has worked in the City for 20 years. He was at GLG, the hedge fund, until mid-2007 and at Merrill Lynch, the investment bank, before that. Married since 1997 to Darcey Bussell, the ballet dancer, Forbes led a charmed life, but in 2007 something changed.

“I started to get interested in the environment. It happened in the stereotypical way. I watched An Inconvenient Truth [the film by Al Gore], then I read Capitalism: As if the World Matters, by Jonathon Porritt, and works by the environmentalist James Lovelock and the activist George Monbiot. You don’t want to read these books after seven o’clock at night because you don’t sleep. I was having palpitations. I just couldn’t justify what I was doing any more.”

Forbes resigned from GLG in late June 2007, just three weeks after Bussell’s final performance at Covent Garden. As the prima ballerina danced to Kenneth MacMillan’s Song of the Earth in that final show, Forbes contemplated what he would do next.

His first port of call was Prince Charles’s Rainforest Project. A job there lasted for five months before he and Bussell and their two young children moved to Australia, where they settled in Sydney.

Six months later Marcus Burns, a former colleague who co-managed the global consumer fund with Forbes at GLG, also returned to his native Australia.

The pair started to discuss their next step and launched Natural Capital Funds Management with $10m of their own and friends’ money in August. They are still raising capital from family offices, wealth managers and small investment institutions.

“The foundation point of the fund is that we have gone from having a single fiduciary duty to a dual one. We want to make money for investors and act responsibly towards the environment,” said Forbes.

He acknowledged that there were plenty of other green funds but few fund-management firms focus exclusively on making sustainable investments.

Natural Capital has bought stakes in 25 companies, including Mastercard, China Shineway, a herbal medicine business, and Intertek, a London-listed product-testing company. Forbes and Burns liked Mastercard because it is at the forefront of the movement from cash to e-payment, which means less paper money floating around the world.

All the stocks in their portfolio must meet basic investment criteria. They must be under-valued and generate cashflow.

Before an investment is made, the managers examine a company’s environmental footprint, covering everything from its water and electricity consumption to the efficiency of its computer servers. This weeds out the pretenders.

After that Forbes and Burns are looking for a long-term commitment to creating a sustainable environment.

They do sector-specific tests on the company to ensure it is as green as it claims — a luxury handbag maker, for example, would have to prove that the chemicals used in the tanning process are not polluting the environment round the factory.

The key test, though, falls on management, according to Forbes. “Businesses that have a champion are what we are looking for — someone at the top who is passionate about the cause and is infecting the entire organisation with his passion. We want to invest in people who are thumping their desks trying to get their company to the top of the field on this issue.”

Source: www.business.timesonline.co.uk and www.naturalcapitalfm.com