https://harici.com.tr/norvec-etik-yatirim-kurallarini-askiya-aldi/
"Norway suspends 'ethical investment' rules."
Norway has suspended ethical investment rules to prevent the $2.1 trillion asset fund from having to sell Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet shares on the grounds that they work for the Israeli government.
Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg told the Financial Times (FT) that the world's largest state fund has publicly announced concerns about the US after the company sold Caterpillar shares over the use of its bulldozers on Palestinian soil.
Norway's center-left government suspended the work of the independent ethics council on Tuesday, adopting an urgent motion in parliament.
Stoltenberg said the ethics council plans to review technology companies such as Alphabet, the owner of Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and companies on the UN blacklist published in July.
The report by the UN special rapporter Francesca Albanese states that the three tech giants “have increased their capacity for data processing, decision-making, surveillance and analysis by giving Israel almost government-wide access to cloud and artificial intelligence technologies.”
“It is clear that the current framework could lead an independent organization to decide to remove some of the world's largest companies from its fund,” Stoltenberg said in a statement. This will damage the purpose of the fund to become a large, diversified global investment fund," he said.
The oil fund had a turbulent period for several months due to its presence in Israel, and it sold half of Israel's assets and Caterpillar under intense political and public pressure in Norway due to the war in Gaza.
The current regulation includes the ethics council of the oil fund advising the Norwegian central bank, which hosts the fund and makes the final decision on disposing, on whether to sell the shares of a particular company.
Stoltenberg said he was concerned that the sale of shares of one of the U.S. tech giants (the seven largest companies account for more than 15 percent of the fund's stock assets) would damage the fund's index fund status and threaten Norway's welfare state.
The fund accounts for about a quarter of the country's annual budget. The proposal was accepted only with the support of the two largest center-right opposition groups.
Leftist politicians, whom the government needed to pass the budget, reacted strongly to this move. “That means that if you're a big enough company, you can do anything you want,” Green Party leader Arild Hermstad told the FT.
In a separate interview, Socialist Left Party leader Kirsti Bergstø said, “Norwegian politics should not be affected by the fear trafficker of [US President Donald] Trump. I am concerned that the Norwegian government will make decisions that will please Trump and technology oligars, instead of its own people and its moral belief in not investing in genocide," he said.
Stoltenberg also said that the fund's ethical rules will be reviewed soon to be considered whether it can invest in more defense companies. Companies such as Boeing, Airbus, BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin are among the companies that the fund cannot invest in because they produce nuclear weapons parts.
Former NATO chief Stoltenberg said Norway took advantage of the nuclear umbrella of its defense alliance and that Oslo had signed a £10 billion deal with the UAE for warships.
The minister said, “At least this is a paradox. For all these reasons, it's time to review these code of ethics... As one of the world's largest wealth funds, we are facing serious dilemmas. These questions do not have easy answers. However, we need to handle it better in the ethical rules than we have done so far," he said.
The fund's ethics committee welcomed the review and noted that there was a “political dispute” over companies linked to Israel and Gaza.