Good morning. With just over $3 billion of assets under management, the Church of England Pensions Board isn’t a huge fund even within the world of British pensions and asset managers.

But with a remit of investing ethically, as well as providing returns to pension holders, the pensions board is part of a growing movement of investors that aren’t afraid to play a big role in challenging companies on issues such as climate change or improving the lives of local communities.

• Its approach to investing: The board’s chief responsible investment officer, Adam Matthews, said he doesn’t consider his team to be radical investors, but ethical considerations are imperative to its strategy. Its approach, largely, has been to work directly with companies, especially at the board level, to drive change, while also having regular meetings with figures from the church itself to understand its ethical position on different topics.
   
• Taking a stance: But more recently, it has taken a more confrontational stance that is growing in popularity: using shareholder proposals to put pressure on boards to enact change.
   
• Not the only one: The Church of England Pensions Board isn’t alone. In 2023, the number of shareholder proposals on environmental issues submitted to public companies during the proxy season in the U.S. rose to 188, up from 169 in 2022, according to a post on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.

Also see: Some Corporations Seek to Silence ‘Trojan Horse’ Activists

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H&M comes out against carbon offset plan from climate targets group.

Swedish fashion giant H&M has come out against a proposal by the world’s most influential body on corporate climate targets that would allow companies to use carbon offsets to help meet their environmental goals.

Voicing concerns. In a letter to the Science Based Targets initiative’s board of trustees, Leyla Ertur, H&M’s head of sustainability, said the company was concerned about the possibility of companies using carbon offsets to lower their overall carbon emissions by purchasing credits for carbon removal projects, saying that action should be taken by companies within their value chains to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Top proxy firm recommends against Elon Musk’s Tesla pay package.

Another top proxy firm is urging Tesla shareholders to vote against Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar pay package.

In a report, Institutional Shareholder Services said Musk’s pay package was excessive and “outsized from the start.” The opposition follows a similar recommendation days ago from proxy firm Glass Lewis.

• The Wall Street Whisperer Leading the Charge for Elon Musk’s $46 Billion Pay Package

• The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Robert Scott Murray and Trillium Capital with a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the stock of Getty Images Holding through a phony offer to purchase the company, according to Dow Jones MarketWatch.
   
• A Chinese regulator has fined a unit of China Evergrande Group almost $580 million for alleged financial misconduct.
   
• The Federal Aviation Administration said Boeing has crafted performance goals that the agency will use to determine whether the jet maker’s efforts to improve quality are succeeding.
   
• Crypto fans at this year's Consensus conference in Austin, Texas, are rallying around what they see as a sea change in the government’s attitude towards crypto.

Pentagon chief says war with China neither imminent nor unavoidable.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that a war with China is neither imminent nor unavoidable, striking a nonconfrontational tone a day after his first face-to-face meeting with his Chinese counterpart.

Speaking at a security summit in Singapore on Saturday, Austin signaled that the Biden administration is seeking to cool tensions with China, despite an increase in friction following military activities by both countries around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.

• China’s Defense Chief Turns Down Temperature on Tensions With U.S.
• U.S., Chinese Defense Chiefs Confirm Plan to Reopen Hotlines in First Face-to-Face Meeting
• China Wants a Bigger Role in the Middle East. But Not Too Big.

OPEC+ agrees to extend production cuts in bid to boost oil prices.

OPEC+ on Sunday agreed to extend all production curbs into next year, a deal that likely signals oil prices will remain elevated through the U.S. presidential election.

Goal of the curbs. The curbs are aimed at bolstering prices and avoiding a global surplus in a context of rising output from other nonmember producers, particularly the U.S., and concerns over demand amid high interest rates and inflation.

• The U.S. is pushing on twin diplomatic tracks in Gaza, seeking to stop the war through a cease-fire proposal backed by President Biden, while also joining talks this weekend to reopen a route for aid into the enclave that was closed when Israel advanced along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Both efforts come with road bumps.
   
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused China of pressuring countries to boycott a peace conference he is promoting in Switzerland later this month.
   
• The recent landslide disaster in Papua New Guinea has put a renewed focus on efforts to better forecast when and where landslides might happen.
   
• China’s factories retrenched unexpectedly in May, snapping a two-month run of growth and raising fresh questions over the nation’s export-led push to revive its ailing economy.

Live Nation says hacker selling stolen data on dark web.

Live Nation Entertainment said a hacker accessed its data and was purportedly selling user information on the dark web.

The Ticketmaster owner said in a regulatory filing Friday that the unauthorized activity in a third-party cloud database was identified May 20. The company said the threat actor had offered what it said was Live Nation user data for sale via the dark web earlier this week.

The company said it didn’t believe the incident is likely to materially impact Live Nation’s business as of the date of the filing.

• A Japanese cryptocurrency exchange said it was hacked for more than $300 million worth of bitcoin, the latest in a series of heists to hit the digital-currency industry.

• Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon have been patching things up.
   
• Skydance Media’s revised offer to buy Shari Redstone’s family company National Amusements and merge with Paramount Global gives the entertainment conglomerate’s nonvoting shareholders an option to cash out at a premium, according to people familiar with the matter.
   
• Two years into a nearly $53 billion government effort to shore up the U.S. chip industry, the program’s impact is becoming clearer: Big companies making advanced chips are getting a boost, but there are limits to what the money can do.
   
• The pace of innovation in AI is slowing, its usefulness is limited, and the cost of running it remains exorbitant.
   
• Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who once tried to ban TikTok, has joined the social-media platform in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election in November.

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