Will a handful of shareholders committed to the fight against global warming succeed in wrecking one of the largest companies in the world? This is what the Follow This collective hopes, which has tabled an advisory resolution on the agenda for the next general meeting of the TotalEnergies group, which will take place on May 26. The text, if accepted, will order the French giant to model its objectives on compliance with the Paris agreements by 2030.
Thursday, April 27, it was the BP company that was in the crosshairs of Follow This. Thanks to record profits, the oil group announced in February that it was going to invest more in renewable energies, but also in hydrocarbons, thereby slowing down its ecological transition. In response, the collective tabled a similar resolution.
“Changing the system from within”
The man behind Follow This is Mark Van Baal. This former Dutch engineer, specializing in cold rooms, says he experienced an epiphany after watching the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006), by former US President Al Gore. He then embarked on journalism and wrote for several Dutch media on climate change and its consequences.
One of Mark Van Baal’s main targets is Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil and gas giant. “After ten years, I have come to the conclusion that Shell does not listen to journalists, or activist groups, or governments. The only ones who can convince Shell to choose another path are its shareholders,” explains the activist on his website.
Aware of his own impotence, Mark Van Baal then set out to “change the system from the inside”. To influence the course of companies whose valuation sometimes exceeds the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country, the Dutchman adopts the methods of shareholder activism. This practice consists of activists entering the decision-making bodies of companies in order to question the leaders about their practices, which are considered to be ethically dubious.
Small and large shareholders
On its site, Follow This offers everyone the opportunity to buy a small part of an oil company, for a few euros. We can thus afford a Shell share for 33 euros, or BP for 11 euros. A mode of action that is particularly suitable for Anglo-Saxon countries, in which the limit for presenting a resolution at a general meeting is quite low.
In France, and for a company the size of TotalEnergies, it is necessary to own 0.5% of the total capital in order to have a say. In order to reach this threshold, the collective joins forces with institutional partners. For the text which will be presented next May, the members of Follow This can count on the support of major shareholders in the company, such as La Banque Postale AM, Edmond de Rotschild AM, La Financière de l’Echiquier, Mandarine Gestion or Sycamore AM. In total, the 17 players concerned represent 1.5% of the shares of the oil group.
However, the text has little chance of being accepted. In 2020, the collective had already presented a similar resolution against TotalEnergies, which had been rejected despite the approval of 17% of shareholders. Same fate for that filed this Thursday at the general meeting of BP: it collected only 16.75% of the vote. Far from the majority of shareholders. But not enough to stop Mark Van Baal: his first resolution, presented against Shell in 2016, had collected only 3% of the vote.