Inside the brewing fight over the SEC’s ESG enforcement

The nation's top securities regulator had been warned. advertisement advertisement Soon after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released a proposal late last year to boost the presence of women, LGBTQ and other minorities on public company boards, hundreds of comment letters started rolling in. Among them: missives from conservative groups who trashed the plan. Their criticisms ran the gamut. The proposal, which would impact 3,500 companies listed on the Nasdaq, was unconstitutional , racist , sexist and far outside the bounds of the SEC's mandate, they groused—a bungled attempt at "faux diversity," in the view of one writer. On August 6, the SEC, which oversees Nasdaq, approved the diversity plan anyway. It took only three days for the conservative Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment (AFFBR) to hit the agency with a lawsuit asking a federal appeals court to overturn the decision. A similar suit was filed earlier this month by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a group that describes itself as "the conservative movement's only full-service shareholder activism and education program." advertisement advertisement An SEC spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about the lawsuits. Financial regulators are treading into matters related to environmental, social and governance… Read full this story

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