Marcus Osei didn't plan to end up in ESG compliance. He studied economics in Accra, did a master's in environmental law in Frankfurt, and spent his early career doing environmental permitting work for an infrastructure consultancy. When Vortex Energy — a mid-sized renewable energy developer with projects across Germany and Poland — asked him to build their ESG compliance function, he wasn't entirely sure what that meant yet. Two years in, he has a clearer view than most.
Q: ESG is a term that gets used to mean almost anything. When you say ESG compliance, what are you actually talking about?
A: When I talk about ESG compliance at Vortex, I mean three distinct things that often get blurred together. First, there's regulatory compliance — meeting the mandatory obligations that come from things like the EU Taxonomy Regulation, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the supply chain due diligence laws. Second, there's voluntary framework alignment. Third, there's ESG risk management — identifying environmental, social, and governance risks that could affect the business, regardless of whether there's a specific regulation attached to them.
Q: You joined Vortex specifically to build this function. What did that actually involve in the first few months?
A: Mostly listening and documenting, which felt frustratingly slow at the time but turned out to be essential. Before you can design any controls or reporting processes, you need to understand what the company actually does — where its environmental footprint sits, what its supply chains look like, what social commitments it has already made. In the energy sector, the complexity is real. Mapping all of that took about three months.
Q: The EU Taxonomy Regulation is now central to how investors assess whether energy assets are genuinely sustainable. How has it changed your work?
A: It's made the work much more rigorous and, honestly, much more interesting. Before the Taxonomy, ESG reporting was largely self-referential — you could decide what to measure, design metrics that reflected well on you. The Taxonomy changes that by setting out specific technical screening criteria. For a wind energy developer, the Do No Significant Harm assessments are genuinely demanding. We had one project where the biodiversity impact assessment flagged potential effects on a protected bat species, and working through whether the mitigation measures were sufficient required engagement between our environmental consultants, our legal team, and the relevant German state authority.
The biggest misconception about ESG compliance is that it's soft. People hear 'sustainability' and they think it's about writing nice things in an annual report. But when you're doing a Taxonomy alignment assessment, you're working with technical screening thresholds, life-cycle analysis data, and biodiversity impact metrics.
Q: Greenwashing risk is something a lot of compliance functions are trying to get their arms around. How do you handle it internally?
A: My approach is to position the compliance function as a pre-publication review step for any sustainability-related claim that goes externally. That's created some friction with the marketing and IR teams, who don't always love having a compliance sign-off on their language. But we've had a few near-misses — claims about carbon neutrality that were based on carbon offset purchases rather than actual emissions reductions, which would have been both misleading and potentially caught by the EU Green Claims Directive.
Q: For someone earlier in their career who wants to move into ESG compliance, what does that path look like?
A: The good news is that ESG compliance is still young enough that there isn't one canonical path. What matters more than a specific prior role is a combination of technical curiosity and the ability to translate between disciplines. What I'd suggest practically: get familiar with the EU Taxonomy Regulation and the CSRD — read the actual texts, not just summaries. The people who are going to do this well in five years are the ones who are building that substantive knowledge now.