Kommunal Landspensjonskasse, Oslo, also said Monday that it will freeze all investments in Russia.
KLP, which has 901.3 billion ($102.3 billion) Norwegian kroner in assets, will exclude 22 Russian companies and work to sell related investments that add up to just under 500 million kroner, it said in a statement.
KLP Investment Management Managing Director Havard Gulbrandsen said in the statement that KLP and its funds don’t exclude at the country level, however, there are extraordinary factors. Mr. Gulbrandsen is also CEO of KLP.
Mr. Gulbrandsen called it a due diligence-based exclusion, “because there is an unacceptable risk of complicity in violations of KLP’s guidelines through the companies’ activities.”
In addition to Russia violating Ukraine’s sovereignty, a KLP prohibition against a war of aggression was also a factor, the statement said. The companies excluded could be used directly or indirectly to support warfare in Ukraine, and “there is a high risk that the companies will be used to supply energy or material to the Russian military or otherwise finance the war,” Mr. Gulbrandsen said.
The Church of England is also selling its direct Russian holdings and banning any further investments by managers for the Church Commissioners for England £9.2 billion ($12.3 billion) endowment and the £3 billion Church of England Pensions Board fund.
Before the decision, the collective investments in Russian companies represented 0.16% of total assets, and there were no investments in Russian sovereign debt, a Church of England spokesperson said in an email.
In a joint statement on Saturday, officials in the U.S., European Commission, U.K., Canada, France, Germany and Italy said they were imposing sanctions on Russia’s central bank and remove other lenders from the Swift global financial messaging system used for international payments.
