Every interest we hold, and the controls that make this checkable.

A conflicts statement that rests on good intentions is worth nothing. The intent is that our holdings do not affect how anything is scored; the controls below are the part that matters, because a reader can check them.

Financial interest

Marga Partners’ principal holds share options in Galderma, retained from prior employment. No other financial interest is held in any company whose products we score.

Diversified passive holdings are excluded from this disclosure. Index funds, exchange traded funds, target date funds and managed accounts, where the holder does not select individual positions, are not treated as an interest in a scored company. Direct positions, sector-concentrated funds, options and private stakes are disclosed. The Galderma options are disclosed because they are a direct position in a single scored company.

What follows from that

The interest holder does not score the affected products. Where the person scoring also holds an interest in a scored company, those products are scored by someone who does not.

Results are reported with and without the affected products. Reporting only the combined set would leave a reader unable to tell whether the interest made a difference, which is precisely the thing they need to be able to check.

Every score is reproducible from its evidence. Each observation carries a dated source and each score carries the registry version it was computed under, so any score can be re-derived and checked against the same standard applied everywhere else.

Client relationships

No company whose products the index scores is a current or former client of Marga Partners. If that changes, the relationship is disclosed on the face of any output covering that company, and this page is updated before publication rather than after.

Where we publish forward-looking scores, every one carries a standing disclosure of any commercial relationship with the sponsor, whether or not one exists. Publishing only on companies we have no relationship with would look safer and is not: a register whose composition is itself a disclosure tells a reader something we did not choose to tell them, and it stops being a clean test.

Commissioned work

A commissioned read is one a party pays for. A commissioned read is never published without the express written consent of the commissioning organisation, and that consent is to publication itself. It is not consent to alter a finding.

The separation runs one way only. Commissioning work cannot obtain a change to a published score, and a commissioned finding does not enter a published read without the disclosure above.

Before publication

Only Marga Partners sees a score before it is published. Not the company being scored, not a commissioning client, not a distribution partner. There is no review window, no right of reply before publication, and no embargo copy.

Disputes

A score changes only when new information changes what the evidence supports.

• A change requires additional information, data or resources that was not available when the score was computed. Disagreement is not new information.
• The same standard applies whoever supplies it. A scored company, a competitor and a reader face identical requirements. A commercial relationship does not create a faster or lower-threshold route to a change.
• Every change is recorded: what changed, the evidence that caused it, the version before and after, and the date. A score that moved and cannot say why is treated as unreliable rather than corrected.

Nothing here permits a score to change because a scored party objects to it.

What is not on this page yet

An independent validation study is currently being scored by two assessors who are blind to how any of the historical cases turned out. Naming which products are in that corpus, or how any of them was graded, would put part of the answer in front of the people being asked for an independent judgement.

That detail publishes in full when scoring closes, together with the results reported both with and without the products we hold an interest in. It is held back for the duration of the scoring and for no longer.