Norway dumps Wal-Mart from $240 billion investment fund OSLO  Norway said on Tuesday that its $240-billion oil fund would no longer invest in Wal-Mart (WMT) , the world's biggest retailer, because of what it called "serious and systematic" abuses of human and labor rights. Norway's government also excluded shares in mining group Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold (FCX) from the fund — one of the world's biggest pension funds — for environmental reasons. The fund sold its holdings in both firms, which had been worth about $430 million at the end of 2005 — most of it in Wal-Mart stock — by the end of last month, the finance ministry said. "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 said. The move raised the number of companies excluded from the fund for what Oslo calls ethical reasons to 19. Norway has previously ejected companies involved in producing anti-personnel land mines, cluster bombs or nuclear weapons. 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 labour rights," the finance ministry said. "The recommendation to exclude Freeport is based on serious environmental damage." A Wal-Mart spokeswoman declined to comment. Freeport-McMoRan's spokesman said the company rejects the allegations and they are based on a misunderstanding. The ministry said the council had found "an extensive body of material" that indicated Wal-Mart had broken norms, including employing minors against international rules, allowing hazardous working conditions at many of its suppliers and blocking workers' efforts to form unions. It also listed other alleged Wal-Mart abuses including pressuring workers to work overtime without compensation, discriminating against women in pay and blocking "all attempts to unionise". It said Wal-Mart employees were "in a number of cases unreasonably punished and locked in". The council's report encompassed Wal-Mart's operations in the United States and Canada and its suppliers in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Lesotho, Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, Malawi, Madagascar, Swaziland, Bangladesh, China and Indonesia. The finance ministry said Norway's central bank, which manages the investment fund, had invited Wal-Mart to comment on the allegations in September, but the company did not respond. Halvorsen said Norway might provide an example to other investors in the way it exercises ownership rights. "It is of great value that others see what we do," Halvorsen, who also leads the Socialist Left party, told a news conference. The ministry blamed Freeport-McMoRan for using a natural river system to dispose of tailings from a huge copper mine on the island of New Guinea in Indonesia. "The Council on Ethics finds that the environmental damage caused by the mining operations is extensive, long-term and irreversible," it said. Freeport-McMoRan's spokesman Bill Collier said the tailings were not toxic. "They did contact us," he said of the fund's managers, Norway's central bank. "We furnished them with our information, but we feel this reflects a misunderstanding." Collier said Freeport conducts comprehensive monitoring of the water in the river and the area where the tailings are deposited, including sediment, plant species and aquatic organisms. "And it has never detected a problem," he said. The fund had held about 2.5 billion Norwegian crowns ($416 million) worth of Wal-Mart securities at the end of the 2005, and its holdings in Freeport-McMorRan were worth about 116 million crowns, the ministry said. All were sold by the end of May. 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. Contributing: Carole Vaporean in New York, Jessica Wohl in Chicago and Joergen Frich in Oslo. Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. Click for Restrictions.