AkademikerPension publishes on its website:
Patience has a way of wearing thin. And that’s ours at AkademikerPension when it comes to Tesla.
“It’s no secret that Tesla has been a market leader in the green transition for years. But when we can tick off a long list of issues year after year with no prospect of improvement – in fact, quite the opposite – it’s hard to argue that we should remain invested,” says our CEO, Jens Munch Holst.
There are three main reasons why exclusion becomes a reality:
1. Tesla has been working against employee labor rights for years and has a long history of union resistance and workplace discrimination.
2. In our opinion, Tesla has major challenges regarding board independence and is undoubtedly the mega-cap stock with the least independence on the board, which literally consists of friends and family .
3. It is impossible to talk about Tesla without talking about Elon Musk. He is the definition of Tesla. But recently he has increasingly interfered in American and European politics. He has publicly supported controversial political figures, spread misinformation and criticized governments. This has created major risks to returns, as many investors and customers have turned their backs on the company. In short, Elon Musk is, in our opinion, destroying the brand and the value
Last theoretical chance
However, there is a theoretical possibility that the exclusion will be canceled. Because Tesla’s board of directors will have one last chance to show that it is prepared to listen and change course. This will happen at the company’s general meeting in June, where AkademikerPension has submitted a shareholder proposal regarding the employees’ right to form and join trade unions. And the matter is clear: If the proposal is voted down, we will exclude the company.
“We don’t have high expectations that the proposal will be voted through, so the exclusion is clearly in the drawer. But the Tesla board will have one last opportunity to change our position,” says Jens Munch Holst, who is upset that it has come to this.
“It’s no secret that we are big advocates of active ownership. And for years we have tried to get the company to make some of the changes that we find necessary. But sometimes you have to realize that the desired change is too far away or there is no prospect of it. And that is the situation with Tesla, we assess,” says Jens Munch Holst.
Specifically, the exclusion means that we sell off the remaining 200 Tesla shares and put the company on our exclusion list, which means that neither we nor any of our managers may buy Tesla shares until the exclusion is lifted at some point.
“I hope that at some point we can invest in the company again. That’s how I feel about all the companies we have excluded. But it requires some fundamental and structural changes that I am not immediately optimistic will take place in the near future,” concludes Jens Munch Holst.
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