Fritz Kaiser: Responsible wealth crusader
The Responsible Wealth Review is an elegant, slim publication the second issue of which appeared without fanfare this month.It contains no adverts and has a small print run of 5,000 copies in English and German. You will not find it on any newsagent’s shelf but may come across it on the desks of some of Europe’s wealthiest and most influential people. Cast your eye down the list of contents and you will find articles by two Nobel prize winners, the chief executive of Nestlé and Queen Silvia of Sweden among others.
The foreword is by Fritz Kaiser, the chairman and founder of a group called the Private Wealth Council and effectively the publisher of the Responsible Wealth Review.
“We set up the Private Wealth Council four years ago as an invitation-only group for substantial wealth owners,” explains Kaiser, who is also chairman of Kaiser Ritter Partner, a Liechtenstein-based wealth adviser.
“The idea was for a group of peers to explore and promote the idea of responsible wealth ownership. But rather than be seen as some sort of secret society we decided we needed to communicate with a broader community, so last year we published the first Responsible Wealth Review.”
Issue one focused on privacy and coincided with the controversial pursuit of tax dodgers by the German and UK governments through the purchase of client data stolen from Lichtenstein’s LGT Bank.
Many articles were unashamedly intellectual, including a history of privacy since ancient Greece and a comparison of US and European approaches to legal privacy. “I’m quite a thoughtful person – I like to be stimulated by different things,” says Kaiser. “One of the goals of the council is to bring diff erent perspectives to wealth owners.”
Arguably the stand-out piece in the first issue was by Al Gore, the former US Vice-President turned environmental crusader. It laid out nine drivers of global change that provide a framework for developing a model of responsible wealth ownership or, as Kaiser likes to put it, “navigating on the right side of change”.
Pages folded out to provide a striking visual representation of Gore’s ideas, courtesy of a so called scribe who attends Private Wealth Council meetings and produces a pictorial version of events (see right).
Kaiser says: “If you can understand the drivers of change and navigate on the right side of change then you have a better chance of being a successful long-term investor rather than just another gambler in the market.”
SIMPLE FORMULA
The first meeting of the Private Wealth Council took place at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2004. Two days of discussion focused on finding a defi nition of what it means to be a responsible wealth owner.
The outcome, says Kaiser, was a deceptively simple formula: you are responsible for yourself, your family, the society you live in and the planet you live on.
Among the 25 wealth owners and thought leaders at the meeting was Erik Brenninkmeijer, chairman of Cofra, the holding company of the Dutch family that made its initial fortune from the C&A department stores. “Erik came to me afterwards and said that he had no peer group like this where he could discuss the responsibilities of substantial wealth ownership, and that he felt these discussions would help him make better decisions,” says Kaiser.
Another Brenninkmeijer, Marcel, has contributed an article to the second issue of the Responsible Wealth Review describing the success of Good Energies, the investment company he founded eight years ago to focus on renewable energy businesses.
The issue is dedicated to the idea of responsible investment, which is ultimately the goal of Kaiser’s initiative. And while it includes articles on philanthropy (from Queen Silvia) and microfinance (from Grameen Bank founder and Nobel prizewinner Muhammad Yunus), Kaiser says this does not mean he regards either as part of responsible investing.
Nor is it to be confused with social entrepreneurship, he adds: “A social entrepreneur aims to create a social benefit in a self-financing system while a responsible investor is a social capitalist: he wants to make a profit from his investment that is at least as good as what he could make by doing something else with his money.”
He sums up the idea of responsible investing as “making money while doing good”, which he contrasts with the mainstream investment industry philosophy of “just make money” and the halfway house of “make money but do no harm”, which might mean screening out, for example, military or tobacco companies from a portfolio.
He believes the financial crisis has given added impetus to the responsible investment ideal. “This is like kickstarting a movement,” he says. “But all the members will circulate these ideas to their own networks: they are the ambassadors for this philosophy. It could grow very quickly – you just have to look at the people involved.”
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN THE FEBRUARY, PRINT EDITION OF WEALTH BULLETIN WITH THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
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