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By Sharon Bentley-Hamlyn, investment manager at Aubrey Capital, a specialist global manager with offices in Edinburgh and London.

As the manager of a European fund that endeavours to invest in companies with strong ESG credentials, I find it increasingly dispiriting to witness the discrediting of this style of investing. Following on from the downgrading of Blackrock, Amundi and various other funds from SFDR Article 9 status to Article 8, and the politicisation of ESG between the so-called 'progressive' and conservative wings in the USA, we now have the Adani scandal in India and the discovery that the Adani name appeared in more than 500 so-called Article 8 funds that are supposed to 'promote' environmental, social and governance goals. We now find these companies are getting removed from indexes and placed under review amid allegations of fraud and market manipulation.

The ESG SFDR definitions are so imprecise as to allow a range of different interpretations. Ask the man on the Clapham omnibus what he thinks promoting environmental, social and governance goals means and he might reasonably go back to basic, commonly accepted ethical principles: Do not pollute, do not kill, do not harm, do not steal, and yet companies flouting all of these are being included in ESG portfolios.

So what exactly is ESG?

It seems to us that in its original intent, ESG was meant to encourage ethical investing, but in the process of developing a......................

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