Well, Visiting, it isn't.
TU members have to pay into a separate political fund, Fidelity members do not
TU members can opt out of paying into that fund. Fidelity members cannot.
TU members have to vote every ten years on whether to keep their political fund. Fidelity members do not. And by the way, every time they have been asked, trade unionists have voted overwhelmingly (85-90+%) to maintain their fund in a process condemned by the Better Regulation Taskforce for its burdensome nature.

Comparing trade union funding of Labour to corporate funding of the Tories is simply an exercise in muddying the water.

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I can't see how investing in the Tory party will give any kind of return to the pensioners and so it's a misuse of other peoples money.

No wonder there is such a pension shortfall.

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But the profit comes from the return from our money. And if they have got £415,500 to spare why not return it to their customers rather than spending it funding a political party?

I've also just found out that Fidelity pays to employ a Tory MP as a consultant on fianancial services. Clearly someone high up in Fidelity wants to channel money to the Tories, regardless of what clients think about it.

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Rubbish. Profits from pension company investments are the funds for the pension payments!!!  That's the whole point of it.

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"The person who siad Fidelity should put the money they make back into the pension put is utterly wrong"

I hope you don't mean me, since my argument is not at all that Fidelity shouldn't make a profit. My point is that they should not make partisan political donations - to ANY party.

PS Fidelity is not a listed company so doesn't have to put its donations to a shareholder vote (because there aren't any shareholders) but perversely it gets to vote on political donations made by companies that are UK-listed.

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"Listing is not relevant to the law on political donations"

The point was that as Fidelity is not a listed company therefore no-one (customers, shareholders) gets a say over its partisan donations. It's problematic because Fidelity itself gets to vote on political donations made by listed companies.

Most institutional shareholders oppose party political donations in principle - and its in NAPF guidelines etc - but how can we have any faith in Fidelity to take a line that is in thebest interests of its clients when it makes partisan donations itself?

 

"Irrelevant considerations could give rise to breaches of their duties ... and I can see situations where a trustee making a choice of fund manager purely on the basis of which political party that the fund manager supports being found to be in breach of his duties as trustee."  

realistically no trustee is going to sack them purely over this issue, but it's fair enough to take it into account in the selection (or retention) of a fund managers if their are other non-partisan providers of an equal competence available.

and equally a trustee could subvert their duties by selecting Fidelity because the company is a partisan Conservtaive supporter?  

so surely the bigger question is the potential conflict of interest when pitching to pension funds that have Conservative councillors on the trustee board. at the least surely Fidelity should disclose the donations in such situations and Conservative councillors should absent themselves from the selection process. fair enough? 

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Looking at Fidelity's legal info on its website, I am not sure that the UK is a subsidary ... but nothing turns on this anyway.

If we ban UK companies which have business in the UK from making donations, should not the same rules apply to other associations with members?  At present companies provide informaton about shareholders, transactions etc in publicly available information (and that applies to all types of company, whether limited by shares or guarantee and whether public or private).  Company law on political donations is strict and must be complied with and, with a little effort, it is possible for anyone to access the records that are all publicly available (through a company search).

I see how you express your concern with regard to 'corruption' but I don't see how you say the 'corruption' arises.   

It has been suggested that the pension fund trustees are also Conservative Councillors - is this correct?  Check with your pension fund and find out.  If it is, seek the minutes of the meeting at which Fidelity was chosen as the fund manager.  These minutes ought to show the reasons for the choice of manager - and I doubt that the political donations registered, let alone was a basis for the decision.  If it isn't (which I suspect is the case), then there is no evidence to support an allegation of 'corruption'.  If there are conservative councillors who are trustees, they should declare any conflict properly and the trustees collectively will decide what to do.

It has been suggested that Fidelity would vote for donations by other companies in which funds invested.  My view is that this is exceedingly unlikely.  The person with the power to vote is not the fund manager but the trustees of the fund.  It is correct to say that the trustees can properly delegate the power to the fund manager, but such delegation is usually done with instructions in relation to certain types of resolution - and others have correctly pointed out the NAPF's guidance. 

Again, from a brief (and I accept incomplete) look at the voting record of Fidelity, I can discern no votes in favour of political donations of any sort. 

The difficulty with all of this is that the more barriers we place in the way of making political donations the more political parties will come to be dependent on professional politicans and the more our politicians will be removed from the rest of us. 

The reason I joined the fray here was because of the inaccurate information being put out about shareholder votes on political donations in private limited companies.  The problem with these sorts of attacks, based on inaccurate understandings, is that they don't advance the debate one iota.

If we ended up with replacing private funding of political parties with public funding do you have any doubt that your party and mine would find reasons for an every increasing number of millions being handed to each of them?  There is enough power in the hands of the parties; what is needed is transparency in funding and the partisan attacks (by all sides) need to stop - valid attacks on, for example, the dependency of one or both parties on the funding by a small number of individuals is fine, but attacks based purely on misunderstanding, misapprehension and misrepresntation need to stop.  The only beneficiary of these last attacks are the cynics - and possibly the comics!

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