From Reuters:
OSLO - Norway on Tuesday said its more than $240 billion oil fund would no longer invest in the world's largest retailer Wal-Martdue to what it called "serious and systematic" abuses of human and labor rights. The Norwegian government said it had also decided to exclude shares in mining group Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold
from the oil fund's for environmental reasons. The Finance Ministry based the exclusions on the recommendations of the fund's ethical council.
"The recommendation to exclude Wal-Mart cites serious/systematic violations of human rights and labor rights," the Finance Ministry said in a statement. "The recommendation to exclude Freeport is based on serious environmental damage."
It said the council found "an extensive body of material" that indicated Wal-Mart had broken norms, including employing minors against international rules, dangerous working conditions at many of its suppliers and blocking workers' efforts to form unions.
It blamed Freeport-McMoRan for using a natural river system for disposal of tailings from a huge copper mine on the island of New Guinea in Indonesia."These companies are excluded because, in view of their practices, investing in them entails an unacceptable risk that the Fund may be complicit in serious, systematic or gross violations of norms," Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen, who is also the leader of the Socialist party, said in the statement.
The fund had sold its holdings in both companies by the end of May, the ministry said. It held about 2.5 billion Norwegian crowns ($415.9 million) in Wal-Mart shares at the end of the 2005 and its holdings in Freeport-McMorRan were worth about 116 million crowns, the ministry said.
The Government Pension Fund -- Global, which invests surplus oil wealth in foreign stocks and bonds, was worth 1.48 trillion Norwegian crowns ($246.2 billion) at the end of March. The fund, one of the world's biggest pension funds, is managed for the government by Norway's central bank.
The move raised the number of companies' stocks excluded from the fund for ethical reasons to 19. Most recently, in January, Norway had excluded seven defense-related stocks, including Boeing
and Honeywell , because it said they were involved in producing nuclear weapons. The exclusions were the first made independently by the Labor-led coalition government which took office in October 2005 after winning a general election. The exclusions announced in January had been decided by the previous coalition.
Posted by Laura - June 6, 2006 10:14 AM - In The News