3i Group creates Web site on corporate responsibility

By CATHERINE CRAIGAugust 22, 2008

U.K.-listed 3i Group PLC has become the first private-equity firm to create a Web site entirely dedicated to corporate social responsibility, as the firm aims to be carbon-neutral by 2010.
The site comes nine months after David Walker, the former chairman of Morgan Stanley International, produced a report for the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association that demanded greater transparency from the industry.
The site contains details of the firm's corporate social-responsibility policies, case studies giving practical examples of its work, its in-house corporate-responsibility committee, and investment-performance data that values the firm's portfolio at £6 billion, or more than $11 billion.
Ben Harding, spokesman for international buyout firm Apax Partners, said 3i presented a model to aspire to in terms of the detail it provided concerning corporate social responsibility -- the measure of a firm's consideration for its employees, the environment and society at large.
But the move is unlikely to be welcomed by all members of the industry. Some have criticized the increasing amount of information about corporate responsibility available to the general public as excessive.
In November last year, Alchemy Partners founder Jon Moulton labeled the increased levels of disclosure expected from private-equity firms as "mildly nuisancesome" and was critical of the moves being made by buyout groups toward disclosure akin to that of public companies.
In its 2008 report on corporate social responsibility, 3i said it had embarked on a three-year program last year to achieve carbon neutrality -- the act of neutralizing its carbon emissions through reduction and offset schemes -- by 2010.
• From Financial News at www.efinancialnews.com.