The Financial Conduct Authority has appointed Desiree Fixler, DWS’ former sustainability boss who brought greenwashing allegations against the group, to its ESG committee.

Fixler, who is the founder of RYSN Consulting and chair of VentureESG, has made the cut for the regulator’s new board advisory committee, which will provide guidance on how it monitors the City’s ESG compliance and the development of its own green agenda.

Since it began recruiting experts for the committee in August, the FCA has outlined incoming rules for its green labelling regime for UK funds and started developing a voluntary code of conduct for ESG ratings providers as part of a greenwashing crackdown.

It’s a subject that hits close to home for Fixler, who blew the whistle on her former employer DWS, which she claimed had overstated in its 2020 annual report how much it used sustainable investing criteria to manage its assets.

This sparked external investigations by German regulator BaFin and the US Securities and Exchange Commission into Deutsche Bank’s fund arm and saw its CEO Asoka Woehrmann resign.

READ DWS trawls more than two million documents as internal greenwashing probe nears end

On 7 December, DWS’ new boss Stefan Hoops said the group’s own internal probe, launched in October 2021, was nearing completion.

Fixler joins five other ESG industry heavyweights on the FCA’s newly minted committee, including ShareAction chief executive Catherine Howarth; Simmons and Simmons partner and global head of ESG Sonali Siriwardena; and the former chief executive of the Global Reporting Initiative Tim Mohin.

Rounding out the new recruits are Tom Gosling, an executive fellow in the department of finance at London Business School, and Harald Walkate, a senior fellow at the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) at the University of Zurich.

FCA chair Ashley Alder will also sit on the ESG committee, alongside director of ESG Sacha Sadan and other non-executive directors at the City watchdog.

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To contact the author of this story with feedback or news, email Kristen McGachey

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