The world’s largest fund has divested its stakes in 11 Israeli companies and is reviewing more.
Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund says it is terminating all contracts with asset managers handling its Israeli investments and has divested parts of its portfolio.
The announcement on Monday came after an urgent review launched last week after media reports said the fund had built a stake in an Israeli jet engine group that provides services to Israel’s military, including the maintenance of fighter jets, as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the Palestinian population rages.
The fund, an arm of Norway’s central bank and the world’s largest, held stakes in 61 Israeli companies as of June 30 but in recent days divested stakes in 11 of these, it said in a statement.
“We have now completely sold out of these positions,” the fund said, adding that it is continuing to review Israeli companies for potential divestments.
“These measures were taken in response to extraordinary circumstances. The situation in Gaza is a serious humanitarian crisis,” Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management, said in a statement.
“We are invested in companies that operate in a country at war, and conditions in the West Bank and Gaza have recently worsened. In response, we will further strengthen our due diligence.”
The fund stated that it has “long paid particular attention to companies associated with war and conflict”.
“We constantly monitor companies’ risk management related to conflict zones and respect for human rights,” it said.
The Norwegian government began its review after Aftenposten, the country’s leading newspaper, revealed that the fund had a stake in Bet Shemesh Engines Ltd (BSEL), which provides parts to Israeli fighter jets that are being deployed in the war on Gaza.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store had said at the time that the investment was “worrying”.
The sovereign fund, which owns stakes in 8,700 companies worldwide, has sold its stakes in an Israeli energy company and a telecommunications group in the past year.
In June, Norway’s largest pension fund also decided to sever its ties with companies doing business with Israel. That same month, however, Norway’s parliament rejected a proposal for the fund to divest from all companies with activities in occupied Palestinian territory.
Several of Europe’s biggest financial firms have cut back their links to Israeli companies or those with ties to the country, according to an analysis of filings by the Reuters news agency, as pressure mounts from activists and governments to end the war in Gaza.
Last month, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel, including a full arms embargo, and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”.
In a report titled From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, Albanese detailed “the corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory”.
The report singled out companies – including arms manufacturers, technology giants, heavy machinery companies and financial institutions – for their “complicity” in Israel’s repression of Palestinians from sustaining Israeli expansions onto occupied land to enabling the surveillance and killings of Palestinians.
