Governance for Owners (GO) is an independent partnership between major institutional share owners, a long-term financial backer and GO senior executives (all of whom have made significant personal investments in the partnership). GO is dedicated to adding long-term shareholder value for clients by exercising owners’ rights.
GO offers two main products:
The GO European Focus Fund invests in a small number of European public companies where value can be added through exercising owners’ rights to address key structural or strategic governance issues that have historically impaired company performance.
The GO Stewardship Service offers independent voting, corporate engagement and other advisory services on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) matters. The voting service covers approximately 2,000 companies in the major markets of Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, Peru and Russia. Engagement programmes address ESG issues on selected companies within clients’ portfolios. To advance the cause of good corporate governance, we also provide corporate governance advice in the context of shareholder litigation in the US.
GO is organised as an independent partnership between major institutional share owners, a long-term financial backer and GO senior executives, all of whom have made significant personal investments in the partnership.
GO’s full-time staff and advisors include experienced professionals with general business skills, investment management and ESG expertise. Our team is uniquely positioned to engage constructively with public companies.
GO’s experience has shown that shareowners can work with boards and management in a relational manner to support value creation by companies. GO was established by Peter Butler and Steve Brown in late 2004 and started operations in Europe and the USA in mid 2005, and in Japan in 2007. They have experience in shareholder engagement and governance going back to 1998 and have jointly established four shareholder engagement funds during that time.