An official with the Securities and Exchange Commission is admonishing top money management firms BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard for not pressing companies they hold stakes in to disclose information about their political campaign contributions, according to Bloomberg.
Democratic SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson says these money managers have consistently voted to oppose shareholder resolutions that would force the companies they invest in to reveal how much they contribute to special interest groups. These three fund management giants typically are the biggest owners in many of the largest public U.S. companies.
Jackson said the agency came to these conclusions after looking at 15 years of data on shareholder resolutions. He sent his findings to Representative Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat and wrote that the three fund management giants are currently opting to “keep corporate political spending in the dark” and noted that “for the largest institutions,
there is virtually no variance by company or over time.”
For its part, Vanguard told Bloomberg in a statement that political spending has not yet “warranted intensive proxy voting…
