Sabahan wins Sustainable Investment Challenge
KOTA KINABALU: Malaysian student, Nigel Cledwyn Motinius was announced the winner of an international investing competition ‘Sustainable Investment Challenge 2022’, overcoming 13,750 participants from around 95 countries.
The competition was held by Banka Generali based in Milan, Italy with the cooperation of other agencies such as MIP Politecnico di Milano, MainStreet Partners Italy and CFA Society Italy.
Nigel who is from Sabah and currently studying Law in University of the West of England, Bristol, expresses his joy when the investing system he implemented performed well in the competition’s market condition and winning was a happy coincidence, though he was grateful, nonetheless.
The participants were judged on their commercial awareness, ability to trade in the market and perform detailed research of a company’s ESG.
ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, is a scoring system aimed at informing investors the sustainability of a company’s business. The overarching goal is to prevent polluting companies from receiving investments to create more pollution, and reward companies that focus on sustainability efforts.
During the investing stage, participants were expected to maintain profitable investments in company with good ESG scores while navigating the impact of world events. At the end, top ranking participants were asked to write down a final report which explains their investment strategy.
On receiving the final reports, Paolo Fabris, a partner at Advantage Reply praised the quality of the final report and Nigel’s ability to execute his plans.
“Nigel’s report is the best one of all investment editions so far. He presented in an excellent way the investment strategy he was going to follow, and he actually follow the strategy he designed,” he said.
When asked about Malaysia’s focus in integrating ESG into the country’s economy, Nigel shared that a lot of difficulties in implementing a blanket approach. The ESG concept is still a bit ambiguous and there are a lot of variances for ESG scoring.
“For example, a law firm will not have the same score weightage when compared to a paper company, these will all have to be coordinated by the government which will then have to abide by international standard. And the standard is being realised by big groups like the EU, US and big investment firms.
“But any country that wants to be competitive will have to double down on this effort. And I think the focus is well deserved,” he explained.
Nigel says the ESG movement is growing increasingly rapid in Malaysia with the Ministry of International Trade and Industry expecting to visit the United States reinforce Malaysia’s value proposition as the preferred investment destination and trading partner with ESG as the main focus.