The trust is the brainchild of 32-year-old Irving Vázquez, who served as a capital analyst and portfolio manager at Colombian asset manager Sura’s Mexican pension fund.
Vázquez said that Fibra Eco seeks to create a real opportunity for investors to have an impact on the environment, and not just brag about green goals like some other companies do.
“This is a totally innovative business model,” Vázquez said in an interview. “I don’t see it as a trust, I see it as a real estate platform with an advantage in operations and technology.”
At Afore Sura, as the Mexican pension fund is known, Vázquez helped lead a shareholder push to force greater transparency from the country’s real estate trusts, which have structures like external advisory firms that critics say foster conflict. interest.
In 2019, it assumed the operations of Afore Sura to meet the environmental, social and governance investment objectives, known as ESG integration (environmental, social and corporate governance); It also helped establish an association among Mexican institutional investors to demand that the country’s companies begin reporting ESG in line with global guidelines.
Earlier this year, Vázquez left Sura to set up the new trust that he says embodies what he has been preaching to the local market. There will be no outside management fees and instead of being stuck with the common control clauses in Mexican Fibras, shareholders will vote for members of the trust’s technical committee, which is like a meeting.
The trust statutes establish that the committee will be made up of at least 50% women and will be mostly independent. Today, women hold only 10% of the positions on the boards of directors of the 35 companies in the Mexico IPC index, according to a study by Miranda Partners.