AP7, the default provider in Sweden’s €200bn premium pension system, has added three companies to its exclusion list – two from China for having large coal activities without transition plans and an Irish firm on nuclear weapons grounds.
The SEK855bn (€79.5bn) pension fund announced it was adding Ireland’s Eaton Corporation to its investment blacklist for involvement in nuclear weapons, while China Coal Energy was joining the list due to extraction of thermal coal, along with another Chinese firm, GD Power Development, for coal production.
AP7 said the latter two companies were being blacklisted because they conducted large-scale coal operations without credible climate-change plans.
France’s Renault, on the other hand, is coming back into the fold.
“Renault SA is no longer blacklisted due to the fact that there is no verified information about ongoing norm violations from the company,” AP7 said on Thursday.
The Swedish national pension fund’s investment blacklist – which is revised twice a year – now carries the names of 104 companies.
AP7 described the list as “an engagement tool to persuade companies to turn into a more sustainable direction”, and existed in collaboration with other engagement tools such as company dialogues and voting at general meetings.
The pension fund said: “AP7 invests in the companies that in an acceptable way act according to the requirements of the international conventions that Sweden has signed, and which are expressed in the UN Global Compact’s ten principles, which describe companies’ responsibility for human rights, working conditions, the environment and anti-corruption.”
The pension fund added that it also blacklisted firms participating in the development and production of nuclear weapons.
Since December 2016, it said, the Paris Agreement to the UN Climate Convention had been one of the standards on which the analysis was based.
“The climate blacklist is being developed continuously in line with the IEA’s [International Energy Agency] roadmap for net-zero climate emissions by 2050,” AP7 said.
IPE has contacted China Coal Energy, GD Power Development’s parent company, China Guodian Corporation, for responses to AP7’s statement. Emails and phone calls to Eaton Corporation’s media contacts listed on the firm’s website were not accepted, however.
Back in June, Sweden’s AP7 said it was adding 14 firms to its blacklist, all for failure to act in line with the Paris Agreement due to large-scale coal operations or oil sands extraction without credible transition plans.
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