Norway wealth fund divests from several Israeli companies due to Gaza war

The world’s largest money has divested its stakes successful 11 Israeli companies and is reviewing more.

Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealthiness money says it is terminating each contracts with plus managers handling its Israeli investments and has divested parts of its portfolio.

The announcement connected Monday came aft an urgent reappraisal launched past week aft media reports said the money had built a involvement successful an Israeli pitchy motor group that provides services to Israel’s military, including the attraction of combatant jets, arsenic Israel’s genocidal warfare connected Gaza and the Palestinian colonisation rages.

The fund, an limb of Norway’s cardinal slope and the world’s largest, held stakes successful 61 Israeli companies arsenic of June 30 but successful caller days divested stakes successful 11 of these, it said successful a statement.

“We person present wholly sold retired of these positions,” the money said, adding that it is continuing to reappraisal Israeli companies for imaginable divestments.

“These measures were taken successful effect to bonzer circumstances. The concern successful Gaza is simply a superior humanitarian crisis,” Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, said successful a statement.

“We are invested successful companies that run successful a state astatine war, and conditions successful the West Bank and Gaza person precocious worsened. In response, we volition further fortify our owed diligence.”

The money stated that it has “long paid peculiar attraction to companies associated with warfare and conflict”.

“We perpetually show companies’ hazard absorption related to struggle zones and respect for quality rights,” it said.

The Norwegian authorities began its reappraisal aft Aftenposten, the country’s starring newspaper, revealed that the money had a involvement successful Bet Shemesh Engines Ltd (BSEL), which provides parts to Israeli combatant jets that are being deployed successful the warfare connected Gaza.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store had said astatine the clip that the concern was “worrying”.

The sovereign fund, which owns stakes successful 8,700 companies worldwide, has sold its stakes successful an Israeli vigor institution and a telecommunications radical successful the past year.

In June, Norway’s largest pension money besides decided to sever its ties with companies doing concern with Israel. That aforesaid month, however, Norway’s parliament rejected a connection for the money to divest from each companies with activities successful occupied Palestinian territory.

Several of Europe’s biggest fiscal firms person chopped backmost their links to Israeli companies oregon those with ties to the country, according to an investigation of filings by the Reuters quality agency, arsenic unit mounts from activists and governments to extremity the warfare successful Gaza.

Last month, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations peculiar rapporteur connected the occupied Palestinian territory, called connected countries to chopped disconnected each commercialized and fiscal ties with Israel, including a afloat arms embargo, and retreat planetary enactment for what she termed an “economy of genocide”.

In a study titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, Albanese elaborate “the firm machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial task of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians successful the occupied territory”.

The study singled retired companies – including arms manufacturers, exertion giants, dense machinery companies and fiscal institutions – for their “complicity” successful Israel’s repression of Palestinians from sustaining Israeli expansions onto occupied onshore to enabling the surveillance and killings of Palestinians.

Source:

Al Jazeera and quality agencies