EQ Investors: Asking questions and catalysing change through AGMs

Attending company Annual General Meetings (AGMs) is one of five tools in our stewardship strategy, alongside our engagement with fund managers, collaborative investor coalitions, voting oversight and direct company dialogue.

This AGM season, we put questions directly to ten UK-listed boards, spanning five of our six strategic engagement themes.

Why do we go?

Physical meetings with company boards are a rare opportunity for any shareholder – large or small – to be heard by the people ultimately in charge of an invested company’s strategy.

It is a space that we feel strongly needs to be protected from being made fully “virtual”. A “hybrid” format enables accessibility for stakeholders across the world, a fully online space on the other hand allows for more censorship of questions, and ultimately less accountability.

This is a live topic debated in parliament, and EQ Investors supports ShareAction campaign to defend the AGM in the UK.

2026 AGMs: Here’s what we asked, and why

Climate change: Banking & transition

Standard Chartered: We challenged the bank on financing new LNG infrastructure in emerging markets without country-level transition assessments and called for clear client- or country-level targets to avoid locking-in long-term fossil fuel use across the high-growth markets it serves.

Barclays: With oil and gas markets whipsawed by the conflict in Iran, we asked how Barclays is protecting its climate commitments and capital-allocation plans from short-term geopolitical pressure, and pushed for a clear assessment of the credit, transition and reputational risks of any dilution.

Physical climate risk

BT: Storm Amy’s 2025 outage on Tiree, which cut broadband, mobile and landline services to the island for weeks, became the backdrop for a pointed question: why did BT’s own disclosure downgrade physical climate risk from “moderate” to “low” this year, and will BT commit to asset-level transparency on resilience gaps at its highest-risk UK sites?

Vodafone: With wildfires affecting Spain and France underscoring the point, we asked why Vodafone’s climate scenario analysis concludes physical risk is limited without disclosing the quantified financial exposure behind that conclusion. We also pushed the board to clarify what governance and resourcing sit behind physical risk management beyond business-as-usual processes.

Access to medicine

GSK: Freshly ranked number one in the Access to Medicine Foundation’s new Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark, GSK was asked to put numbers behind that leadership: what investment and resourcing protects its WHO-priority pathogen R&D as peers retreat from the space, and what is needed to help build the regulatory incentives the sector needs.

AstraZeneca: Co-filed with another asset manager, our question asked for disaggregated data on the “people reached” by AstraZeneca’s oncology patient access programmes, shifting the conversation from broad commitments to trackable numbers for investors.

Healthy markets (nutrition)

Tesco: Hit its 65% healthy sales target, proof the model works commercially, but its new commitment (“year-on-year healthy sales growth”) drops the specific benchmark that made the old one credible. Speaking for ShareAction’s Healthy Markets coalition ($6tn AUM, 50+ investors), we asked Tesco to define a minimum threshold so progress can be properly assessed.

Unilever: With the proposed McCormick combination on the table, we asked Unilever to confirm that its nutrition disclosure commitments and expertise would remain intact through the transition. We also pressed for a sales-weighted Health Star Rating target, given its lagging ATNI ranking.

Biodiversity

Reckitt Benckiser: We welcomed real progress on responsible palm oil sourcing but flagged Reckitt’s fall in the Global Canopy Forest 500 ranking, and speaking for the UN PRI Spring investor coalition, asked for a time-bound roadmap extending due diligence, traceability and grievance monitoring to all forest-risk commodities, not just palm oil alone.

Antofagasta: The mining site Los Pelambres has a genuinely strong, TNFD-aligned biodiversity programme, but it’s the only one of Antofagasta’s four mines that does. Centinela, Antucoya and Zaldívar show zero biodiversity management plans despite sitting near recognised Key Biodiversity Areas and confirmed endangered species, and Centinela is mid-expansion. We asked for a timeline to close that gap.

What happens next?

While the answers we receive on the day vary in depth, specificity and commitment, they put investor demands directly to boards and keep sustainability front of mind. AGM season is one moment in a year-round programme, and most of our questions form part of collaborative engagements that will re-iterate the demands and follow up with detail.

Our engagement themes run multi-year, and what we learn from these direct engagements feed directly into our fund manager engagement priorities. We look
forward to reporting on the successes in our impact and sustainability reporting for our portfolios over the coming months.