Portfolio coverage of Private equity funds

Methods
1

Currently we are calculating our portfolio coverage by looking through all underlying investments in private equity funds.

Having a couple of private equity managers with their own verified SBTs (using the Private Equity Sector Guidance) should investments in these funds count as 100% aligned or should we continue to request SBT data on the underlying investments?

2

My own two cents:

  • Using the portfolio coverage, we count companies with a SBT as aligned - even if targets are brand new and no reductions have yet been achieved.
  • If the same logic should be applied to private equity funds, we should count fund investments where the manager have a SBT as aligned - even if none of the underlying portfolio companies have their own SBT yet. However guidance is unclear
3

Can’t agree at all…
Regarding

  1. Why should we count a private financial firm as “SBT aligned” if they invest in companies that have defined targets but haven’t achieved anything?
  2. What does it mean for a manager “to have a SBT as aligned”?!

Basically you would count 3 times as much the creation of a target, creating some (false or hypothetical) sense of “action”/results happening in the general public, while actually no real action other than filling the SBTi forms and paying the fees are proven to have happened.

Another question then comes to mind: how are the SBTi org fees spent? Where to check? (I’m new here)
Thank you.