OSLO: Norway’s $860bn oil fund laid out its growing clout as a responsible investor as it revealed that it had divested itself from more than 100 companies in the past three years and voted against tens of thousands of resolutions at annual meetings.
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The fund also revealed it had supported 85 per cent of board recommendations on resolutions at annual meetings. That meant it failed to support the board recommendations on about 15,000 resolutions last year including voting against the re-election of Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as both chief executive and chairman of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs respectively. It also voted against the issue of new preference shares at carmaker BMW.
The fund is under growing pressure to use its growing size — on average it owns 1.3 per cent of every listed company in the world — to change companies’ behaviour.
Yngve Slyngstad, chief executive of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, said that it had divested from 49 companies last year — predominantly in coal and gold mining — as it worried about the sustainability of their business models. Since 2012, it has sold out of 114 companies.
