{"text":[[{"start":6.64,"text":"Can a country be too rich to be an ethical investor? Can a company be too big to be excluded from an investor’s portfolio? Such are the dilemmas facing Norway these days, home to the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, replete with $2.3tn of assets."}],[{"start":24,"text":"Norway’s government has been grappling with such questions since its oil fund last year decided to sell out of US engineering company Caterpillar because of its links to Israel’s alleged violations of international law in destroying Palestinian property."}],[{"start":38.76,"text":"That led to an outcry among US politicians close to President Donald Trump, and a review of Norway’s ethical investment framework amid worries that it could soon be forced to sell out of Google owner Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook owner Meta and Microsoft for their sales in Israel."}],[{"start":55.48,"text":"A fierce debate is swirling in Oslo with the government preparing proposals on how the fund should tackle ethical issues. That is being studied closely well beyond Norway’s borders because the answers matter to nearly all investors, many of whom have long followed the oil fund’s lead on this."}],[{"start":72.24,"text":"The fight over how responsible an investor the oil fund should be is ferocious, but also reflects how dependent a very large European shareholder, and country, has become on a few US companies."}],[{"start":84.38,"text":"“These dilemmas are real, and very, very tough to solve. The good thing is that they’re being discussed,” says one Norwegian official."}],[{"start":92.42,"text":"Norway’s oil fund put responsible investing at the heart of its approach after starting up 30 years ago as a rare sovereign wealth fund in a democracy. It soon gained a loyal following among many investors, who copied its decisions to ban producers of tobacco, nuclear weapons and more recently coal, as well as selling out of individual companies such as Walmart over labour rights and other issues."}],[{"start":116,"text":"But the fund has grown so much bigger than anybody initially expected that its importance in Norway is hard to understate — the government uses it to cover a quarter of the country’s budget each year and its assets are about four times the size of the economy."}],[{"start":129.76,"text":"That in turn means every decision it makes is heavily scrutinised. Selling out of Caterpillar was controversial enough, but excluding one of the big US tech companies was likely to get even more under Trump’s skin, judged finance minister and former head of Nato Jens Stoltenberg. (Trump is already upset with Norway, calling it a “shithouse country” at the weekend, over an independent Norwegian committee not giving him the Nobel Peace Prize)."}],[{"start":154.24,"text":"Stoltenberg set up an expert group to look at balancing the ethical considerations of preserving the fund’s wealth for future generations and ensuring its holdings are not involved in gross breaches of international norms."}],[{"start":166.12,"text":"Perhaps most eye-catching of all was the recommendation by the expert group — led by former central bank governor Svein Gjedrem — to permit the fund to invest in nuclear weapons producers in the US, UK and France, allowing it potentially to buy into the likes of Boeing, Airbus and Lockheed Martin again."}],[{"start":184.68,"text":"That was greeted by howls of protest among leftwing parties in Norway vital to keeping the minority government in power — but also by plenty of support from many foreign policy heavyweights who pointed to the hypocrisy of Norway depending on Nato’s nuclear umbrella but not investing in the companies maintaining it."}],[{"start":202.6,"text":"Potentially, more interesting was the report’s examination of the growing importance of the biggest US tech companies. It pointed to research by Norges Bank, the country’s central bank, that excluding Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft — all of whom had been singled out by UN officials over their work for Israel — would have reduced the oil fund’s return by about a quarter, or NKr533bn ($57bn), from 2012 to 2025."}],[{"start":231.24,"text":"Their recommendation was for the fund to consider the effect any ban on a company would have on its diversification — something critics argue that in practice means that some companies are too big to be excluded."}],[{"start":245.16,"text":"Anders Haug Larsen, director of international advocacy at Rainforest Foundation Norway, is one of many pressure groups to worry that it adds up to the biggest companies facing a “lower ethical threshold than others”."}],[{"start":256.24,"text":"Norway’s government will publish its proposal on how to resolve the dilemmas in the spring, and the country’s parliament will debate it next summer. The outcome will resonate far beyond Norway’s shores."}],[{"start":272.84,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793172475_9413.mp3"}