Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund Excludes 52 Coal-Related Companies

April 21st, 2016 by Joshua S Hill

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, has announced it is excluding 52 companies based on its new product-based coal criterion guidelines.

Early in 2015, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), managed by Norges Bank, announced that it had divested from 51 coal companies in 2014. In May, a report was released suggesting that this was in fact “pretend divestment,” and that the Fund had in fact increased its holdings in the coal industry by over 3 billion kroner.

Within days, however, the Norwegian Parliament announced that it intended to divest from companies that generate more than 30% of their revenue or activity from coal. It was a bold move to silence critics, and to continue the divestment movement which seemed so important to the people and government of Norway. The guidelines specify “that coal power companies and mining companies who themselves, or through other operations they control, base 30 percent or more of their activities on coal, and/or derive 30 percent of their revenues from coal, may be excluded from the GPFG.”

Fast-forward to April, and Norges Bank has revealed that it has excluded 52 companies from the Government Pension Fund Global “after an assessment of companies and the new product-based coal criterion in the guidelines.” However, these are only the first round of exclusions, and Norges Bank say that “Further exclusions will follow in 2016.”

‘Norges Bank’s Executive Board made the exclusion decision based on recommendations from Norges Bank Investment Management,” Norges Bank said in a press release. “The Executive Board has found that the recommendations satisfies the exclusion criteria and that the companies can be excluded from the fund.”

The full list of companies excluded can be viewed in the link above, but they include names such as China Coal Energy, AES, and Peabody Energy — which filed for bankruptcy earlier this month.









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