Hawke Quoted in The New York Times on SEC’s ESG Enforcement Task Force

Securities Enforcement and Litigation partner Daniel Hawke was quoted in The New York Times article, “Cracking Down on a Wall Street Trend: E.S.G. Fund Makeovers.” The article discusses the growing number of financial companies refurbishing mutual funds into ESG-focused funds and the SEC’s rising scrutiny of these funds—including creating a special ESG enforcement task force to investigate the potential “greenwashing” of funds to make them appear ESG compliant. However, many are critical of the SEC’s increasingly assertive approach toward ESG funds, as these funds are new, still evolving and hard to define.

Hawke stated that SEC regulators are under pressure to ramp up their enforcement of ESG disclosure violations under the federal securities laws; a high priority for the Biden Administration.

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