Legal & General IM may vote down director elections on diversity from 2015

LONDON (Reuters) - Legal & General Investment Management may start voting against company director elections on diversity grounds from next year, the money manager's head of corporate governance said. This includes pushing for an increasing number of women on company boards, Sacha Sadan, LGIM's corporate governance director, told a news briefing. "We are not voting on diversity yet - we are giving (companies) until 2015," he said, adding that the percentage of women on boards in FTSE 100 companies had already grown, due to campaigning pressure. "We are getting towards 25 percent, without a quota and without government regulation." The British government's 2011 Davies Review, led by former trade minister Lord Mervyn Davies, said all FTSE 100 companies should have a quarter of their board positions held by women by 2015, though it stopped short of advocating enforced quotas. LGIM has more than $1 trillion in assets under management, mainly in Britain. It says it is the largest manager of UK pension fund assets. (Reporting by Carolyn Cohn; editing by Simon Jessop)