The sale of the Green Investment Bank (GIB) into private ownership has continued to move forward with the bank outlining earlier this week how it intends to incorporate a ‘special share’ to protect its green purposes.
Almost immediately after the sale of the GIB was announced last year, concerns were raised throughout the green building sector that new private owners could use it to fund any kind of project, even those that could be environmentally harmful.
Following an amendment imposed by the House of Lords on the Finance Bill, which would have removed the statutory requirements to keep the GIB green, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said a special share in the bank would be created. This would grant the shareholder the right to approve or reject any change to the green purposes of GIB on a non-statutory basis.
GIB has this week outlined how this will be accomplished “to meet the spirit and intent of the Lords amendment”. An extraordinary general meeting has already been held to amend GIB’s Articles of Association and allow for the creation of a ‘Special Share’.
A new company, Green Purposes Company, has been established and incorporated into the bank to hold the special share, while three institutions – the Royal Society, ICAS and the Law Society of Scotland – have been selected to find individuals to serve on a nomination committee.
This committee will be asked to select the final three permanent trustees of the special share.
Lord Smith of Kelvin, GIB’s independent chair, said: “We are committed fully to implementing a new special share to ensure protection for GIB’s green purposes following GIB’s move into the private sector. The special share will provide a lock over our green purposes by an independent third party, in place of the current protections provided through the 2013 Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act.
“We have today [21 March] announced progress on three key parts of the Special Share arrangements: passing the resolution to establish the share; incorporating the company to hold it; and, identifying the independent bodies which will help us find well qualified individuals to form a Nominations Committee tasked with finding permanent trustees.”
Lord Smith added that the existing statutory protections over the green purposes will remain in place until the point at which the special share is implemented, intended to ensure there is no gap in protection during the transfer of ownership.
