SiRi Company has announced the launch of SiRi Pro, a new tool for Sustainability Research and Ratings. According to SiRi Company, this service development secures its position as the leading global and independent provider of transparent and customizable SRI research and consulting services for institutional investors and financial professionals.

SiRi Pro (Profiles and Ratings Online) is an innovative, web-based rating tool that can be fully customized to client needs and builds upon the high quality analysis of SiRi Company Profiles. With SiRi Pro, the sustainability rating of companies becomes a fully transparent process. The rating tool enables clients to simply and quickly integrate their unique sustainability vision and sustainability investment policy into company assessments or use standard SiRi Company criteria. Clients can use the tool for benchmarking and individual company assessments, including best-in-class analysis and exclusionary screening.

SiRi Pro allows users to
- Customize weights for each of the over 200 indicators
- Set industry-group specific weights and country risks
- Select amongst a set of some 30 common exclusionary screens
- Upload client-specific company universes
- Save individual settings
- Access more than ten rating report formats
- Download SiRi Company Rating Summaries and detailed SiRi Company Profiles and
- Export files that include share listing codes to facilitate integration into financial tables.

According to SiRi Company, a range of its institutional clients has already begun to use SiRi Pro. A demo version is available for interested organizations.

A SiRi Pro brochure is available to download: http://www.siricompany.com/pdf/Si Ri_Pro_Brochure_2004.pdf

To access the demo site, please contact Mr. Philippe Spicher, Managing Director SiRi Company, phone +41 (0) 79 24 35 955, or your local sales agent.

A recent report from SustainAbility and Mistra called "Values for Money: Reviewing the Quality of SRI Research" provided some updated insight on SRI research organizations' methodologies. The report identifies what it considers to be SRI research best practice and provides some recommendations on how SRI research institutions should develop in the future. The report was widely acknowledged as a valuable contribution to the discussion in the field. At the same time, the report was strongly criticized. Critics noted that the report would lack transparency, its authors would not be independent and its particular model was unsupported by data, examples or illustrations. Peter Kinder, President of KLD Research & Analytics vehemently challenged - in a paper he called "Values and Money - A Research Practitioner’s Perspective on Values for Money" - the recommendation of the Mistra paper, that SRI research organizations and, by extension, socially responsible investment (SRI) should focus primarily on identifying social and environmental issues that are material to business performance.
A discussion worth continuing observation.

An analysis of this discussion, a response from the authors of the report and the links to both the Mistra as well as Peter Kinder’s Report can be found on:
http://www.socialfunds.com/new s/article.cgi/article1362.html

SRI World Group, Inc., a leading provider of social investment and corporate responsibility information services, has recently announced the launch of "OneReport". This new global electronic reporting network shall enable companies to more efficiently report their social, environmental, economic and corporate governance information to investors, the financial community and other stakeholders. Over 50 multi-national companies from around the world, including 22 Fortune 100 companies, participated in the development of OneReport.

OneReport claims to be the world’s first reporting system that seamlessly connects publicly traded companies with the firms that research corporate social and environmental performance for institutional investors. More than 20 research firms worldwide - among them SiRi Company and Partners - have made a basic commitment to collect sustainability data through OneReport. These firms cover over 4,000 companies in 25 countries and will use the data to construct stock indexes and create institutional-level research products that are used to help make investment and proxy voting decisions.

More information: http://www.one-report.com/

East-West Management Institute’s Partners for Financial Stability (PFS) Program and partner research institutions in Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland have published a series of inaugural surveys analyzing listed companies’ disclosures on a broad range of CSR issues. Between September 2003 and March 2004 a regional survey of six Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, a Czech survey, a Hungarian survey and a Polish survey were published on the PFS Program website.

Each survey encompasses reporting on corporate governance, environmental policies and social policies in listed companies’ annual reports and websites. As these eight CEE countries now entered the European Union (EU), listed companies will come under the tighter scrutiny of EU disclosure requirements about these issues. The PFS Program is currently conducting the regional survey for a second time; moving forward, it plans to conduct it on a semi-annual basis.

The surveys are available online at: http://www.ewmi.hu/capitalmarkets_research.p hp

Belgian SiRi Company Network Partner Stock at Stake (Ethibel Group) has recently published a new sector study on the European Banking Industry. Special attention was given to sensitive issues especially financial institutions are confronted with, regarding their internal social policy (e.g. employability, equal opportunities and the quality of social dialogue); their environmental policy (e.g. energy consumption and product policy); their external social policy (e.g. presence in tax havens, basic banking services) and their economic policy (e.g. internal control systems and customer relations).

The results of the study led to an update of the Ethibel Investment Register, which lists the best-in-class companies from a wide variety of industries. Some of the companies out of the Financials sector that were retained or added to the Ethibel Register include: Abbey, Barclays, BMP, Commerzbank, Dexia, HBOS, HVB, Kommunalkredit Austria and Lloyds.

To access a summary of the study visit the Ethibel website http://www.ethibel.org or contact jan.vandenhove@ethibel.org

Based on information provided by the SiRi Network and SiRi Company Network Partner Dutch Sustainability Research as well as additional research a new sector study has recently been completed on six Global Movies and Entertainment companies, including Time Warner, EMI Group, The News Corp., Viacom, Vivendi Universal, and Walt Disney Corp.
The most relevant CSR aspects in this sector are involvement in accounting and marketing irregularities, (child) labor issues, transparency and content of programs or advertisements they broadcast.

In this sector study, three companies appeared to be involved in accounting and/or marketing controversies (Time Warner, Viacom, Vivendi). Some companies are mentioned as being involved in labor controversies, relating to the production of toys or PR materials in Asia (in particular Disney). The companies within the sector study have also been assessed for their transparency regarding their corporate behavior on non-financial issues. EMI Group is being very transparent and rather complete in sharing its policies, programs and results. Other companies lag behind (Time Warner, Vivendi, Disney) and some are notably non-transparent (Viacom, The News Corp.). Being non-transparent is remarkable for companies for which communication and entertainment is their core business.

According to DSR, the companies in this sector show a rather mixed performance with respect to sustainability issues. The majority of the companies appears to be involved in accounting, marketing and/or labor controversies. DSR sees room for improvements especially in regard to performance data and general transparency. Some companies significantly lag behind and have poor performances in general, like The News Corp. and Viacom. Although Vivendi Universal and Walt Disney performed rather well in the relative part of the study, both companies are significantly involved in controversies. EMI Group and The News Corp. were the only companies without major involvement in controversial activities; all in all, EMI outperformed all other companies

For more information, contact: info@dsresearch.nl