Changes to Rathbone SICAV Ethical Bond Fund (“SICAV EBF”)

This letter is for information only.  For shareholders that invest in Rathbone SICAV Ethical Bond Fund, you do not need to take action, but we recommend that you give this letter careful consideration in order to fully understand the changes.

In our capacity as Distributor and Investment Manager of the Rathbone Luxembourg Funds SICAV (“the Company”) to inform about changes to one of the sub-funds. 

What’s happening and why

We are making some changes to Rathbone SICAV Ethical Bond Fund (“SICAV EBF”), as described below. Changes will be effective from Monday 12th August 2024.

Renaming of “Class L” and updating its characteristics

We are renaming the SICAV EBF “Class L” shares to “Class Z” to reflect its intended characteristics and investor suitability. During ongoing reviews of our overall product range, to ensure products remain fit for purpose for all investors, we determined the SICAV EBF “Class L” was inadvertently priced in line with that for Institutional-type strategic partners to Rathbones.

The Prospectus defines “Class Z” as: “is intended for subscription by a) Institutional investors within the meaning of Article 174 of the 2010 Law; and b) only with an agreement already in place with the Investment Manager; and c) only approved at the discretion of the Board of Directors.”

There is no change to the way in which the sub-fund or its classes will be managed, nor to the investment objective, investment policy or risk profile.

The “maximum management fee” as stated within the Prospectus, i.e., 0.49%, is not changing.

We are, however, aligning SICAV EBF Class Z to those characteristics described in Section “X. Shares” of the Prospectus. In other words, the “minimum initial investment”, “minimum subsequent subscription” 
and “minimum holding amount” will be adopted. These are “£100mn” equivalent, “£500” equivalent, and “£1mn” equivalent, as described in the Prospectus.

In good faith, however, we will retain your current “Class L”-equivalent share class terms, with generally lower amounts to reflect client-type suitability.

This renaming of SICAV EBF “Class L” to “Class Z” is a tidy up exercise, which we hope will not greatly inconvenience investors. Impacted ISINs are provided in Appendix 1 of this letter.

SFDR prospectus clarifications

We are also making clarifications to our Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation (“SFDR”) Annex in the prospectus (i.e., Prospectus Appendix A4 pre-contractual disclosures).

As part of our regulatory requirements, we provide various SFDR disclosure requirements within the Prospectus and annual report and accounts (“periodic report”), primarily in relation to SICAV EBF. As these documents are updated at different times, we are taking the opportunity now to improve the alignment between language within the prospectus and periodic report.

The main clarifications to the prospectus, to better align to our published periodic reports, are as follows:

— Sustainability indicators – we have expanded on what our sustainability indicators are to better report against them in our periodic report. For example, “Indicator: Adherence to exclusion standards (%)” sets out that we aim to measure against our exclusion standards and in our periodic reports the extent to which we were able to do this over the reported period. 

— Principal Adverse Impacts (“PAIs”) - we have expanded on how only principal adverse impacts aligned to the investment strategy and objective are considered. This is done as the sub-fund applies negative screening criteria to exclude any issuers in breach of any of the exclusion criteria.  For example, “Exposure to controversial weapons (anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, chemical weapons and biological weapons)”.

The clarifications made to the SFDR Annex do not change to the way in which the sub-fund or its classes will be managed.

We hope these updates makes it more clear to investors on how we measure and report to meet our SFDR requirements, in both the Prospectus and periodic report.

If you have any questions, please get in touch at transferagency@lu.hsbc.com. 
 

Yours faithfully,

Tom Carroll (on behalf of the Board of Directors for Rathbone Luxembourg Funds SICAV)

Appendix: Impacted Share Classes