{"id":1705,"date":"2025-08-29T00:48:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T00:48:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tcap.blog\/?p=1705"},"modified":"2025-08-29T00:48:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T00:48:14","slug":"shareholder-spotlight-amundi-the-quiet-machine-with-a-pretty-esg-badge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tcap.blog\/2025\/08\/29\/shareholder-spotlight-amundi-the-quiet-machine-with-a-pretty-esg-badge\/","title":{"rendered":"Shareholder Spotlight : Amundi – The Quiet Machine with a Pretty ESG Badge"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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They call it stewardship. They call it responsibility. They hand out glossy brochures with pictures of wind farms and smiling graduates, and they pat themselves on the back for being Part Of The Solution. Then they go back to the trading floor, to the quiet spreadsheets and the index feeds, and the numbers tell a different story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amundi is Europe\u2019s giant of asset managers – a bank of money that washes through pipelines into the economy. It\u2019s big enough that when it coughs, markets clear its throat. And big enough to make anything look like the market wants it to. That\u2019s the problem. The bigger you are, the less you get asked politely what the hell you\u2019re actually doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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AMF Fine – The Warranted Slap<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Back in 2021, the French regulator did what regulators sometimes do when they run out of patience – they fined Amundi group companies for actual market misconduct. The AMF enforcement committee found price-manipulation and breaches of professional obligations and imposed fines – \u20ac25m on Amundi Asset Management and \u20ac7m on Amundi Interm\u00e9diation. That\u2019s not a PR slip-up – that\u2019s concrete regulatory pain meant to sting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a difference between a mistake and systemic carelessness. The AMF action reads like the latter – executives punished, warnings issued, pages in a government file that say: you did wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Greenwashing – Pretty Words; Dirty Indexes<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

If you want to talk hypocrisy, start with the green claims. The passive fund revolution – ETFs, index trackers – promised cheap diversification and a veneer of decarbonisation. In practice, many of those funds still own companies that expand fossil fuels and pump carbon into the air. Reclaim Finance did a forensic job and found massive exposure to fossil-fuel expansion across Amundi-labelled \u2018sustainable\u2019 passive funds – their analysis shows most of the passive \u201csustainable\u201d vehicles they examined still hold polluters. That isn\u2019t a nuance – it\u2019s a systemic mismatch between the marketing copy and the reality in the holdings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You don\u2019t get to call something sustainable if the underlying index quietly keeps buying into industries that make climate problems worse. Investors deserve clarity – and journalists deserve receipts. Reclaim Finance provided both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Article-9 Exodus – When Labels Get Scared<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Regulation is a blunt instrument when the rules are fuzzy. When SFDR rolled out, Amundi reclassified almost all of its Article-9 funds to Article 8 – effectively downgrading the \u201cdark green\u201d label that promises explicit sustainability objectives. That move was not unique to Amundi, but it was damning – it shows the industry prefers safer compliance over actually proving its environmental claims when pushed. The reclassification speaks to regulatory ambiguity and to the commercial incentives that favour marketing over measurable results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re running a fund empire, you hike your flags when the wind\u2019s favourable. When the EU starts asking for receipts, you quietly lower a few of those flags and call it prudence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Defence Pivot – Profits Over Pretence?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s where the story gets so tasteless it makes your teeth ache: in 2024-2025 Amundi launched defence-sector ETFs and products that explicitly track defence revenues – a sector that is easy to paint as patriotic and hard to square with the soft-focus sustainability photos. They will point to national security and European strategic autonomy – valid arguments in the abstract. But the optics are glorious – investor-friendly indices that include weapons-makers, struck by the same firms that sell climate-friendly narratives. It\u2019s a pivot that reads like a moral shrug and a profit play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can have a strategic-product pitch and still be honest about it. But when the same brand presents itself as both guardian of ESG and as a seller of armament exposure – expect the cynicism to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Passive Responsibility – The Big Manager Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Passive managers argue they merely track indices. They shrug their shoulders and say: we reflect markets, we don\u2019t pick winners. That\u2019s a dodge. Size brings influence – Amundi is a top owner across thousands of companies. When your funds hold shares in a company, you have votes, and you have the ability to press for change. Silence and passive ownership look a lot like abdication. Industry critics and media investigations repeatedly show sustainable labelling plus heavy passive exposure creates incentives to plead innocence while the underlying holdings do the dirty work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re big enough to be \u201cthe market\u201d in places, you\u2019re also big enough to be responsible for how the market behaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Amundi and Cummins – Yep, They Hold CMI<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This is for our friends, best friends even….the Cummins crowd – a quick check of institutional filings shows Amundi holds a meaningful position in Cummins Inc. (ticker CMI) – over a million shares reported in recent institutional-holder datasets. So yes – this is another company in the wider Cummins ecosystem with assets managed by Amundi. If you\u2019re building a campaign or asking awkward questions at shareholder meetings – Amundi is one of the lines you can pull on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lipstick on a Pig – The Appearance of Action<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What Amundi does, in public phrases, is articulate a posture of action – voting policies, engagement frameworks, stewardship updates. In private, the incentives favour scale and fees. Engagement is easy to promise and hard to measure; passive products produce fees with minimal stewardship overhead. The result is a PR machine that talks climate, while exposures tell their own stubborn, uncompromising story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry\u2019s data problems are real – managers complain about inconsistent emissions metrics and patchy disclosures. But those problems can\u2019t be an excuse for inertia. The question is whether Amundi and peers use data gaps to delay change – or to actually push the companies they own to do better. Evidence to date suggests the former is easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why It Matters<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Because when an asset manager like Amundi gets a little too comfortable, the consequences compound. Dollars and euros flow into companies, into sectors and into projects that shape the economy. If that flow is mislabelled, obfuscated, or primarily driven by marketing, the consequences are not just reputational – they are real-world. Climate outcomes, human-rights concerns, and the ethics of investing are all shaped by these decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amundi\u2019s regulatory fines, reclassifications, greenwashing allegations, and product pivots don\u2019t add up to an accidental oversight. Taken together, they sketch the outline of an institution that knows how to look good without always doing the heavy, unpopular work of real change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sources<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n