EU ‘rule-based’ ESG duties for investment funds and their managers under the European ‘Green Deal’

This chapter focusses on explaining that the recently introduced ‘ESG duties’ for European investment funds and their managers under European financial regulatory laws can be classified as ‘rule-based ESG duties’, largely substituting traditional corporate law ‘ESG fiduciary duties’ applying to European investment funds and their managers. For this purpose, it starts by framing the scope of the EU ESG obligations. It then continues to explain the ‘principle-based’ ‘ESG conduct of business rules’ that apply to fund/asset managers and other actors in the fund domain. The contribution also highlights that the ‘ESG transparency rules’ applying on the ‘product-level’ are more ‘rules-based’ and the EU legislator seeks to ‘feed’ these disclosures with detailed data to be provided by transparency obligations relating to companies on the ‘investment-level’. The chapter concludes with explaining that the European legislator has regulated the whole ‘investment chain’ in the asset management domain to combat ‘greenwashing’.