The ultra-high growth ESG sector claims to have laudable aims of offering investors a way to support the transition to a more sustainable world, but is market enthusiasm creating a breeding ground for fraud? Short sellers think so
A trifecta of pent-up buying power, a zealous demand for sustainable assets from both institutional and retail investors, and the global political push to ‘go green’ is coalescing to push major indices to record highs; but cynics are raising concerns that these forces are also creating a perfect breeding ground for market malfeasance.
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos, who made his name predicting the downfall of Enron and, more recently, Wirecard, has repeatedly dubbed the current market environment, “the golden age of fraud”. He argues that the reflex to decry negative headlines as ‘fake news’ now means some bullish investors are unable to accept that their portfolio contains bad apples until the company’s management are marched out the front door in handcuffs.
The fall of Wirecard last year was widely seen as a vindication for the short sellers and journalists that had doggedly waved red flags over the German payment processing giant’s accounting discrepancies for years in the face of legal threats from the firm and even the German regulator. It was a watershed moment where market sceptics were, for a brief moment, seen as invaluable whistleblowers, not vultures seeking to profit from others’ misery.
More recently, as the West emerges from the COVID winter, many activist short sellers are pointing to widespread examples of firms using the market’s emphasis on allocating to environmental, social and governance (ESG) to support the recovery effort as a way to subvert scrutiny and lull well-intentioned investors into parting with their money.
“Fraud follows the financial market cycle with a lag”, Chanos, founder and president of Kynikos Associates, said in a Bloomberg TV interview in December 2020. The S&P 500 regained all of its Q1 2020 COVID losses as of August and hasn’t looked back since. The index is up 10 per cent year-to-date and 44 per cent since May 2020. The longer a bull market runs, the more likely investors are to suspend their disbelief to avoid missing the next hot thing. In such an environment, those able to help stamp out fraud and malfeasance must also rise to the occasion.
Moreover, the stakes have been raised even higher than previous bull runs given the surge in retail trading by millions of cash-rich individuals stuck at home over the past 18 months. Robinhood, a US no-fee retail broker, welcomed more than 3 million new customers in 2020, while other cheap online trading platforms have also surged in popularity around the world. Many of these new market entrants are believed to be younger than the average age of investors and entering the world of stocks and bonds for the first time. These amateur day traders disproportionately favour stocks with sentimental or ethical value, which in some cases leads to the recent furore around so-called ‘meme stocks’ but more often leads them to ESG-friendly assets.
Beware the big green bubble
In the 12 months following their inception dates, ESG equity funds attracted on average €95 million, compared with €70 million for non-ESG funds, according to data from the European Securities and Markets Authority published in March. In the same report, the regulator highlighted that, based on a sample of 880 equity and mixed funds that rebranded as ‘ESG friendly’, equity funds attracted on average five times more net flows in the 10 months after conversion than in the 10 months before, while mixed funds were able to stem outflows.
Elsewhere, exchange-traded funds (ETF) that track ESG indices chalked up 223 per cent growth over 2020, achieving a new record of $189 billion in combined assets under management, according to TrackInsight. Green-wrappered funds captured $97 billion of inflows last year, while 200 new ESG ETFs were brought to market during the same period.
How much of these inflows came from idealistic market newcomers is impossible to know, but the fact regulators in the US and UK have recently warned retail traders against taking their investment leads from social media and celebrity-endorsed special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), suggests they are worried the Venn diagram overlap is substantial.
As strong tailwinds for the ESG sector intensify, fears are being raised from several quarters — from regulators to industry associations and financial institutions — that the ideological underpinning of the investments will cause thorough due diligence to fall by the wayside and allow bad actors to divert significant capital into their coffers by presenting a disingenuously sustainable face.
This pernicious trend, known as ‘greenwashing’, is not exclusively a problem for the cleantech sectors and similar market segments. According to the results of a survey by the Alternative Investment Management Association and KPMG of 135 institutional investors, hedge fund managers and long-only managers in 13 countries, bad practices also exist right across the investment industry.
Within the hedge fund industry, 41 per cent of survey respondents report a ‘significant amount of greenwashing’; 11 per cent report ‘some greenwashing’; and 48 percent are ‘not sure’. None of the respondents thought there was a ‘minimal amount’ of greenwashing.
The report based on the survey cites the lack of good ESG data as a core contributor to the proliferation of greenwashing and noted that these teething problems will likely be weeded out as sophistication in this sector develops.
The problem extends across the gamut of active and passive fund options, with ESG ETFs, in particular, coming under scrutiny for touting market-beating performance tracking an ostensibly ESG index that on closer inspection is heavily weighted with household name technology stocks, with only a mild peppering of overtly ESG constituents.
Moreover, the third-party ESG ratings that these funds use to rank their indices and funds vary wildly in their methodologies, thereby allowing fund issuers to shop around for the most favourable rating. The next phases of the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation are expected to address these issues, in the EU at least, but until then investors must take on the onerous task of comparing and contrasting ETF prospectuses and scrutinising their underlying ESG rating calculations.
Bear hunters
As investor confidence reigns supreme, the counterbalance of market scepticism is arguably needed now more than ever. The rise of ESG may prove to be a unique opportunity for short sellers to recast themselves in a new light. By weeding out nefarious companies and generally holding a quizzical light up to expose ESG fraud and hypocrisy, short sellers may be able to align with broader market sentiment in a way they have never been able to before.
A slew of reports from activist short sellers highlighting suspected malfeasance by firms claiming to be part of the ESG paradigm shift have already been published so far this year, but the bears are facing significant pushback from several angles. On the face of it, it’s hard to be a short seller in a low interest rate bull market, but the rise of anti-short selling retail investors seeking to flex their collective investment muscles is making the situation worse.
The retail army has claimed several big scalps so far including Melvin Capital and Citron Research, both of which were badly burned during the GameStop short squeeze. The latter subsequently bowed out of publishing short reports after 15 years in the business, following a wave of online abuse.
However, those seeking to crush short sellers are also stripping away an early warning system that could alert them in the event that an investment prospect may not be all that it seems.
“Is the market better off with Citron Research not doing any more short reports because of the abuse that they’ve taken over GameStop,” queried Roy Zimmerhansl, practice lead at Pierpoint Financial Consulting, during a recent webinar by the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments, in partnership with SFT.
“We will need more people checking greenwashing credentials rather than fewer,” he adds. “Partly that’s because people will make mistakes and genuinely think that they’re complying, as well as those people with more malevolent goals.”
Zimmerhansl, who also serves as a member of the college of advisors for the Global Principles for Sustainable Securities Lending (Global PSSL) — a not-for-profit aiming to create a unifying set of ESG principles for the global market — further noted that Wirecard and NMC Health, another recent high-profile short target, were members of mainstream indexes, the DAX 30 and the FTSE 100, respectively. “I don’t recall a lot of long investors or passive index holders calling out fraud and I don’t recall regulators or auditors doing it, I saw journalists and short sellers doing it.”
This view is compounded by Peter Hillerberg, co-founder of data analytics firm Ortex Financial, who told SFT in the immediate aftermath of the Wirecard scandal that hedge funds are reinventing themselves as the fact-checkers of capitalism.
“As trust erodes in the traditional structures that previously held companies to account, new ones will need to emerge,” he argued. “It looks like the historic bad boys of finance may be about to become the good guys.”
Despite the public pillorying of hedge funds on Reddit forums and even by US Senators following the January GameStop episode, some short sellers appear uncowed.
Hindenburg Research and Spruce Point Capital Management are among the most prolific activist short sellers in the game today and have highlighted multiple examples of firms allegedly trying to ride the green wave despite having less than stellar ESG fundamentals.
From clean energy to healthcare, and electric vehicle battery manufacturers, these funds and those like them are finding the blossoming ESG landscape to be a rich hunting ground of short targets.
In fact, following the initial meme stock saga, Hindenburg made the highly unusual decision to release its findings from a four-month investigation into apparent misconduct by Clover Health, a US healthcare provider that went public via SPAC, alongside a declaration it had not taken a negative position ahead of time. This apparently altruistic move was taken to highlight the role activist short sellers play in uncovering fraud and malpractice, the fund said.
Explaining its decision, Hindenburg stated: “Short selling is always high risk, these are unprecedented times; many people are angry and right now we believe it is important to demonstrate the role short sellers play in a healthy, functioning market.”
Short selling reports are often dismissed by the subject of the investigation and its long investors, who highlight the financial incentive a hedge fund has to apply downward pressure on prices, which may lead it to exaggerate a company’s flaws.
In the ESG space, there is the additional defence of framing the accusations as a greedy hedge fund attempting to profit from destroying a company that’s doing something good for the world. This tactic can serve to stir up significant social media support for the accused company and vitriol against the hedge fund, extending to death threats and doxxing — where the personal details of the fund’s employees, and their family members, are made public.
“We are taking that off the table for this one report so the investing public can more clearly see the work for what it is; deep-dive investigative research,” Hindenburg stated.
The report, ‘Clover Health: How the “King of SPACs” Lured Retail Investors Into a Broken Business Facing an Active, Undisclosed DOJ Investigation’, claims that the “corporate world is rife with fraud, and investors have little protection”.
In the vacuum of regulatory, moral and journalistic oversight, Hindenburg argued, “short sellers, like us, have stepped further into the role”.
So do these examples mean short sellers are fully embracing the role of vigilante ESG market watchdog? Not quite.
Hiding behind the greenscreen
At Global PSSL’s inaugural public roundtable, a group of prominent short sellers including Muddy Waters’ Carson Block, discussed their role in the new ESG-centric world.
Answering SFT’s question during the Q&A on how short sellers could approach highlighting a firm’s ESG failings, Block said that activists had to exercise caution as allegations of ethical shortcomings often come across as “sandbagging”, rather than solid investigative work.
He explained that many companies Muddy Waters has identified for financial malpractice often also had poor standards around their ‘E’ and/or ‘S’ practices, but he often did not allude to them in reports as investors either won’t care or it will undermine and dilute the core financial argument.
However, “in the right situation we might experiment,” he conceded, stating he would consider publishing a short thesis that highlighted where a fund was publicly claiming to maintain strong green practices, for example, but was doing the opposite behind the scenes.
Fellow panellist Gabriel Grego of Quintessential Capital Management put it another way: “There is never only one cockroach in the kitchen.” He explained that organisations in financial difficulty will often cut corners in expensive ESG best practices, meaning evidence of poor standards can be an indicator of a deeper rot.
“In some rare cases you can make a very good case based primarily on ESG and, in others, you could add a small part to your report that stated that as well as being an accounting fraud a company also mistreats employees and the environment,” he stated. “ESG is certainly something we should keep in mind.”
Meanwhile, Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research told the virtual audience she was not optimistic that investors would get wise to ESG fraudsters’ tricks any time soon as “the hype bounces from sector to sector”.
“About 90 per cent of the electronic vehicle sector is a grift, and that’s true of a lot of these [ESG] sectors,” she argued, without naming names. “Any area where the technology is difficult to understand and big, extravagant promises can be made, it will be rife with fraud.”
Like Block, Stevenson-Yang argued that, fundamentally, hedge funds had to primarily consider whether other investors will care about their findings of a short target’s misdeeds and question whether their report would stimulate the market into a sell-off action or not.
The roundtable was held as part of unveiling a first-of-its-kind voluntary ESG standard on short activism.
Global PSSL, as a voluntary high-level code, comprises nine principles that align securities lending participants with their ESG ambitions.
Principle five is dedicated to short selling and was developed by the short activist representatives — also including Bronte Capital’s John Hempton — and Global PSSL CEO and founder Radek Stech.
At the launch, Block stated: “Short selling is a venture involving high risk to the individual. But, by its very nature, short activism exposes bad governance, scams, and fraud. It’s reassuring to see someone like Radek co-create a voluntary framework for short activists to prove their ESG credentials.”
The fundamentals of the trade remain unchanged but, attempts to codify ESG across market segments will undoubtedly smooth the transition to a world where considerations around sustainability are front-and-centre in all front-office operations, even shorting.
Don’t sleepwalk into fraud
In the post-COVID world, where the EU and the Biden Administration have pledged to make ESG a central pillar of economic recovery, vigilance in upholding these standards will be paramount.
Ultimately, every individual investor, big or small, is responsible for maintaining robust due diligence practices and taking a good look before leaping into an investment just because it’s enjoying the spotlight for a moment. But, some assistance from the professional sceptics may also help the most bullish in avoiding a wipeout.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, don’t let affection for electric vehicles allow you to be taken for a ride.
