Ethical criteria for investment

In the ethical assessment of issuers, more than 200 criteria are applied, which are systematically analysed for companies or states.
The strict assessment procedure of the PRIME VALUES Ethics Committee has been continuously refined over the past 25 years. From the beginning, a combination of exclusion and positive criteria was used unchanged. The procedure is described in detail in the Eurosif Transparency Guideline.

The assessment of companies/issuers from an ethical perspective is carried out through clear exclusion criteria and ethics analysis to enable a selection of proactive companies.

Investors’ capital is made available to issuers that promote the following principles:

• Best possible protection and promotion of the interests of all stakeholders, including the protection of the natural environment.
• Respect for the dignity of the human being and for life, taking into account the basis of life of all beings
• Creating meaning for society and its development in an ethically positive direction

These principles are concretised in defined exclusion and positive criteria.

Exclusion criteria are used for pre-selection and exclude issuers that do not meet the defined exclusion criteria (according to the above-mentioned principles). If an issuer violates one or more exclusion criteria, it is not analysed further. Should the analysis reveal a violation of exclusion criteria, the security will be excluded from the investment universe.

At the heart of every issuer analysis are the positive criteria. Thanks to these, issuers can be assessed from an ethical-sustainable perspective (divided into the three predicates: defensible, positive or high-quality). Different positive criteria are applied to states than to companies.

The analysis from an ethical perspective focuses on five detailed structured questions for companies.