They call it stewardship. They call it responsibility. They hand out glossy brochures with pictures of wind farms and smiling graduates, and they pat themselves on the back for being Part Of The Solution. Then they go back to the trading floor, to the quiet spreadsheets and the index feeds, and the numbers tell a different story.

Amundi is Europe’s giant of asset managers – a bank of money that washes through pipelines into the economy. It’s big enough that when it coughs, markets clear its throat. And big enough to make anything look like the market wants it to. That’s the problem. The bigger you are, the less you get asked politely what the hell you’re actually doing.

AMF Fine – The Warranted Slap

Back in 2021, the French regulator did what regulators sometimes do when they run out of patience – they fined Amundi group companies for actual market misconduct. The AMF enforcement committee found price-manipulation and breaches of professional obligations and imposed fines – €25m on Amundi Asset Management and €7m on Amundi Intermédiation. That’s not a PR slip-up – that’s concrete regulatory pain meant to sting.

There’s a difference between a mistake and systemic carelessness. The AMF action reads like the latter – executives punished, warnings issued, pages in a government file that say: you did wrong.

Greenwashing – Pretty Words; Dirty Indexes

If you want to talk hypocrisy, start with the green claims. The passive fund revolution – ETFs, index trackers – promised cheap diversification and a veneer of decarbonisation. In practice, many of those funds still own companies that expand fossil fuels and pump carbon into the air. Reclaim Finance did a forensic job and found massive exposure to fossil-fuel expansion across Amundi-labelled ‘sustainable’ passive funds – their analysis shows most of the passive “sustainable” vehicles they examined still hold polluters. That isn’t a nuance – it’s a systemic mismatch between the marketing copy and the reality in the holdings.

You don’t get to call something sustainable if the underlying index quietly keeps buying into industries that make climate problems worse. Investors deserve clarity – and journalists deserve receipts. Reclaim Finance provided both.

Article-9 Exodus – When Labels Get Scared

Regulation is a blunt instrument when the rules are fuzzy. When SFDR rolled out, Amundi reclassified almost all of its Article-9 funds to Article 8 – effectively downgrading the “dark green” label that promises explicit sustainability objectives. That move was not unique to Amundi, but it was damning – it shows the industry prefers safer compliance over actually proving its environmental claims when pushed. The reclassification speaks to regulatory ambiguity and to the commercial incentives that favour marketing over measurable results.

If you’re running a fund empire, you hike your flags when the wind’s favourable. When the EU starts asking for receipts, you quietly lower a few of those flags and call it prudence.

The Defence Pivot – Profits Over Pretence?

Here’s where the story gets so tasteless it makes your teeth ache: in 2024-2025 Amundi launched defence-sector ETFs and products that explicitly track defence revenues – a sector that is easy to paint as patriotic and hard to square with the soft-focus sustainability photos. They will point to national security and European strategic autonomy – valid arguments in the abstract. But the optics are glorious – investor-friendly indices that include weapons-makers, struck by the same firms that sell climate-friendly narratives. It’s a pivot that reads like a moral shrug and a profit play.

You can have a strategic-product pitch and still be honest about it. But when the same brand presents itself as both guardian of ESG and as a seller of armament exposure – expect the cynicism to grow.

Passive Responsibility – The Big Manager Problem

Passive managers argue they merely track indices. They shrug their shoulders and say: we reflect markets, we don’t pick winners. That’s a dodge. Size brings influence – Amundi is a top owner across thousands of companies. When your funds hold shares in a company, you have votes, and you have the ability to press for change. Silence and passive ownership look a lot like abdication. Industry critics and media investigations repeatedly show sustainable labelling plus heavy passive exposure creates incentives to plead innocence while the underlying holdings do the dirty work.

If you’re big enough to be “the market” in places, you’re also big enough to be responsible for how the market behaves.

Amundi and Cummins – Yep, They Hold CMI

This is for our friends, best friends even….the Cummins crowd – a quick check of institutional filings shows Amundi holds a meaningful position in Cummins Inc. (ticker CMI) – over a million shares reported in recent institutional-holder datasets. So yes – this is another company in the wider Cummins ecosystem with assets managed by Amundi. If you’re building a campaign or asking awkward questions at shareholder meetings – Amundi is one of the lines you can pull on.

Lipstick on a Pig – The Appearance of Action

What Amundi does, in public phrases, is articulate a posture of action – voting policies, engagement frameworks, stewardship updates. In private, the incentives favour scale and fees. Engagement is easy to promise and hard to measure; passive products produce fees with minimal stewardship overhead. The result is a PR machine that talks climate, while exposures tell their own stubborn, uncompromising story.

The industry’s data problems are real – managers complain about inconsistent emissions metrics and patchy disclosures. But those problems can’t be an excuse for inertia. The question is whether Amundi and peers use data gaps to delay change – or to actually push the companies they own to do better. Evidence to date suggests the former is easier.

Why It Matters

Because when an asset manager like Amundi gets a little too comfortable, the consequences compound. Dollars and euros flow into companies, into sectors and into projects that shape the economy. If that flow is mislabelled, obfuscated, or primarily driven by marketing, the consequences are not just reputational – they are real-world. Climate outcomes, human-rights concerns, and the ethics of investing are all shaped by these decisions.

Amundi’s regulatory fines, reclassifications, greenwashing allegations, and product pivots don’t add up to an accidental oversight. Taken together, they sketch the outline of an institution that knows how to look good without always doing the heavy, unpopular work of real change.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Shareholder Spotlight : Amundi – The Quiet Machine with a Pretty ESG Badge