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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Spain has been heavily criticised for allegedly facilitating the exile of Venezuela’s main opposition presidential candidate, who under Spanish diplomatic protection was pressured into signing a document recognising President Nicolás Maduro’s victory.

Edmundo González, a former Venezuelan diplomat who the opposition says won the July election, left Caracas on September 7 to seek political asylum in Spain after spending weeks in hiding to dodge arrest. His departure dealt a major blow to the opposition, which had vowed to install González as president when Maduro’s current term ends in January.

Maduro has launched a sweeping crackdown since the election, in which he claimed to have won a third term in a result recognised by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea but not the west. The opposition has produced copies of about 80 per cent of the official tally sheets to prove that González trounced Maduro and the US has backed the claim.

González, who is 75 and has health problems, said this week that he was forced to sign under duress a letter recognising Maduro’s victory as a condition for being allowed to leave Venezuela.

Maduro’s government later published what it said were photographs of González signing the document inside Spain’s embassy residence in Caracas during a meeting with Maduro’s top political fixer Jorge Rodríguez and his sister Delcy, who is vice-president. The Spanish ambassador to Venezuela, Ramón Santos, was also present.

Spain’s conservative opposition leader Alberto Nuñez Feijóo has called for the resignation of Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares and the ambassador over the affair, saying Spanish diplomacy “cannot be at the service of a dictatorial regime”.

A senior Brazilian government official told the Financial Times that the Rodríguez siblings visited the residence to put pressure on González, which was something that “never should have been allowed”.

“Maduro pushed [González] out of the country through intimidation and . . . the Spanish state was the main facilitator,” the official said. “They have to explain what they did and be held accountable.”

The Spanish government rejects allegations that it had a role in forcing González out of the country and insists it had sought to ensure the opposition leader’s security and had been responding to his asylum request.

González had sheltered safely for almost five weeks in the Dutch embassy residence after the election but was only visited by the Rodríguez duo after moving to the Spanish residence.

González became depressed when he realised, about three weeks after the election, that the Maduro government was not going to collapse, and that he would either have to remain indefinitely under diplomatic protection in Venezuela or seek asylum abroad, according to a person close to the opposition.

Around this time he spoke to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a socialist former Spanish premier close to Maduro’s government, who was a key figure in brokering the agreement that led to González’s departure, the person told the FT.

The Brazilian official said he understood that Zapatero had discussed the plan to exile González to Spain with the Rodríguez pair “and helped implement it”. Zapatero could not be reached for comment.

González was transferred to the Spanish embassy residence on September 5 believing that he would receive asylum in Spain, with the final details to be worked out with the ambassador. In the event, two days of negotiations ensued, during which the Rodríguez pair appeared in person with a document for González to sign.

Albares told reporters in Brussels on Thursday that his government had not invited anyone to visit González at the ambassador’s residence and “did not take part in any negotiation of any document”. The ambassador was present during the talks and appeared in the photographs because the residence only had one reception room, he added.

Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at Chatham House, said the signature under such circumstances “violates the very notion of diplomatic asylum, making the Spanish government complicit in the Maduro government’s electoral theft and repression”.

In a statement on Thursday that was intended to calm the storm, González thanked Spain for its support and said: “I was not coerced either by the Spanish government or by the Spanish ambassador to Venezuela, Ramón Santos.” A Venezuelan opposition source in contact with González said he made the statement after an urgent request by Albares.

Venezuela’s government has attempted to exploit González’s departure as a propaganda coup, painting him as weak and cowardly. Jorge Rodríguez brandished a copy of the González document at a news conference on Thursday, describing it as “nothing other than a capitulation”.

Mocking González’s claim that he signed under duress, Rodríguez played excerpts of an audio recording that he said showed a convivial atmosphere with discussions lubricated by whisky. González said the meeting had been photographed and recorded without his permission.

“They showed up with a document that I would have to sign to allow my departure from the country,” González said. “In other words, either I signed or I would face consequences. There were some very tense hours of coercion, blackmail and pressure.”

Ryan Berg, director of the Americas programme at Washington think-tank CSIS, said: “The available evidence appears to suggest Spain played a role in enabling Edmundo González’s forced exile by the regime — a huge blow to Venezuelans who have hoped for change and voted for him.”

As Climate Week NYC kicks off today, leaders in government, business, science, and philanthropy from around the world are coming together to strategize the global fight against climate change. Since last year’s gathering, the world has seen 12 straight months that hit or surpassed 1.5C in average warming. This grim threshold, one set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intended to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, underscores the urgency of the moment.

As the clock ticks down on the time we have left to redirect our Earth toward a more sustainable future, it is now more important than ever that Indigenous Peoples have a bigger seat at the table.

After all, Indigenous Peoples are the world’s greatest protectors of the environment. Our land is not just our home—it is our spiritual connection to the Earth, to our ancestors, to our past, present and future.  

The territories of Indigenous Peoples contain about 40% of the large intact ecosystems scientists say we cannot lose if we want Earth to continue supporting life on Earth as we know it. These ecosystems are critical to the future of our planet, with lower biodiversity loss than non-Indigenous lands. Our land also faces less deforestation, helping our global fight to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Read more: This Is Life in America’s Water-Inequality Capital. It Might Be About to Change

For the Blackfoot People, our land is spread over thousands of miles across North America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Saskatchewan River. It is an incredible sight, a place of environmental preservation and spiritual wisdom. 

When taking in this landscape, it may be difficult to understand the reasons for the destruction that our land and our people have faced. We have had our prairies exploited by natural gas pollution, our sacred buffalo almost entirely wiped out and our language and cultural identity severely diminished. Our tribe and centuries-old culture has been reduced, marginalized, and assimilated to the point of near disappearance. Today, we continue to face the consequences of this trauma, including community fragmentation, drug abuse, alcoholism, and mental health issues. This is why we are working tirelessly to facilitate healing processes 

Yet our tribe’s fight to preserve and restore our way of life is part and parcel of the larger global climate fight, in which greedy corporations and self-interested governments have spent decades setting the natural world on fire by trading things like clean air and fresh water for financial gain. 

As Blackfoot cultural leaders, we know what it means to work for the greater good and long-term prosperity. Many with an individualistic mindset, focused solely on short-term monetary gain, may consider doing business with extractive companies, selling the land, natural resources, water, and plants. However, as Indigenous Peoples, our ancestors taught us to always consider the long-term impact of our actions on future generations. We do not act as individuals pursuing personal benefit, but as a collective, with the responsibility to protect our planet and ensure we leave it in the best possible condition for those who will follow.

This is because what unites Indigenous Peoples around the world is that, even in the darkest times, we remain resilient. Despite our differences, Indigenous Peoples share experiences and trauma with colonialism, exploitation and extraction, powerful forces that have both threatened our ways of life and laid the groundwork for the climate crisis the planet now faces. Yet we remain united in our commitment to protecting and restoring our lands, our cultures and the natural world. This is who we are and who we have always been— a powerful collective force that thinks, feels, and acts guided by the wisdom of our ancestors, with a shared vision of leaving a lasting legacy for future generations.

Nevertheless, as Indigenous Peoples, we are often overlooked when it comes to global climate solutions. From Climate Week NYC to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Indigenous perspectives are underrepresented in the decision-making spaces that determine the direction of our future. In discourse dominated by big money, big names and technological innovation, we often don’t even have a seat at the table. This is a grave mistake.

Instead of selling off our land for profit and destroying our natural environment in the process, for centuries we have proactively found ways to sustain ourselves while protecting and restoring the environment around us. This includes Blackfoot’s decades-long effort to bring back free-roaming buffalo, whose population used to number in the millions but were brought to the edge of extinction. We are proud to be the first sovereign Indigenous nation in U.S. history to have released a herd of free-roaming buffalo back into their natural habitat. 

At the heart of our cultural preservation is our efforts to educate the Blackfoot youth and work towards building the next generation of Indigenous peoples warriors. By teaching them our traditional knowledge, our heritage and our language, Siksikáí’powahsin, we are building eco-knowledge in the younger generations and revitalizing our environmental work. 

While we have made incredible progress in restoring our land, our fight never ends. Oil and gas corporations continue to seek our land for drilling, contaminating our water and disrupting our sacred sites. Each day we must stand our ground and do all we can to ensure environmental justice and protect our land from further destruction. It’s not an easy fight, but it is one we are committed to as a people.

By putting our voices forward, and leveraging thousands of years of experience, Indigenous Peoples play a central role in navigating the climate crisis and helping the world achieve greater ecological, social and cultural harmony. We have overcome incredible obstacles to rebuild from the ground-up. Our worldview, along with our way of thinking and acting as stewards of a legacy, prioritizing the care of our Earth over financial gain, has been essential in bringing us to where we are today. If we want to combat climate change and protect our natural world from destruction, the same must be true on a global scale: we need to choose our collective future and well-being of all life on Earth and future generations over the short-term gains and profits of a few, and we must have Indigenous leaders at the table in order to do so. 

‘Thought I was being executed’

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Darren Walker, the head of the $16bn Ford Foundation, has been one of the world’s leading philanthropists for more than a decade. He has rubbed elbows with US presidents and Elton John. 

He is also a zombie.

In August, Walker failed to win a majority of shareholder support for his re-election at apparel company Ralph Lauren, where he has been a board director for four years. He remains on the board.

This vote tally added Walker to a dubious list of “zombie” board members — ppeople who have failed to win at least 50 per cent support from shareholders and yet remain at their company’s top table. At the end of August, there were 35 zombie board directors at 27 US-based Russell 3000 companies, according to the Council of Institutional Investors, a lobbying group for pension funds.

While that is down from 41 last year and the phenomenon is largely confined to the US, the issue has angered investors who fear a global weakening of shareholder rights.

In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority this year gave companies new power to adopt dual-class share structures, which give special powers to select shareholders. Also this year, Italy’s rightwing government, eager to boost domestic capital markets, proposed board director voting changes that were attacked by investors.

“My view is that the 50 per cent mark, when it comes to director elections, is not a huge ask,” said Donna Anderson, global head of corporate governance at TRowePrice, which manages $1.6tn. “It should be pretty hard to hold on to your seat if more than 50 per cent of shareholders vote the other way.”

“It just is so fundamental,” she said. “It is the principle of the thing.”

Vanguard, the world’s second-largest money manager, said “zombie directors can be indicators of weak shareholder accountability”.

“We view them as a serious governance concern,” a spokesman said. “If a board chooses to retain a zombie director, we believe it is crucial that they provide clear disclosure to investors regarding the rationale.”

Walker received just 47 per cent support from Ralph Lauren shareholders at the company’s August 1 annual meeting. In a regulatory filing, the company said it believed the low vote was due to its dual-class structure, “and not because of any specific objection to Mr Walker”.

In a statement to the Financial Times, New York-based Ralph Lauren said Walker “has been a valuable and additive member” of the board.

“We remain confident in the value that he brings to the company and we look forward to his continued service on our board,” it said. The Ford Foundation declined to comment.

Other companies with zombie director votes this year include AO Smith, which makes water heaters, Veeva Systems, a cloud-computing company, and the parent company of the Samuel Adams beer brand.

While asset managers’ gripes about governance have been waved off year after year, companies harbouring zombie directors have not so easily dodged pugnacious activist investors. 

Elanco, the former animal health unit of Bayer, had two directors who received less than 50 per cent support in 2022 and 2023. This year, activist Ancora attacked the company and demanded board seats, arguing that its board employed “shareholder-unfriendly policies”. In April, Ancora won two board seats at Elanco.

Most big stock markets around the world require a majority of shareholders to back a director in elections, meaning zombies cannot exist. But in the US, state law allows for plurality board elections, which essentially guarantee someone can stay on a board indefinitely unless challenged.

“Because the US has somewhat looser governance rules”, governments in the UK and Italy are considering weakening their corporate governance rules to attract more corporate listings, said Jen Sisson, chief executive of the International Corporate Governance Network, which represents BlackRock, Vanguard and other large asset managers.

“And that’s where investors are advocating so strongly to keep those standards high because we don’t want a race to the bottom of standards,” she said.

“Governance is one of those things that is all very boring until something goes wrong.”