by Keith Richmond
WAR ON WANT has urged ethical investment fund managers to review their holdings in the British mining giant Rio Tinto after Norway decided to exclude the multinational company from its pension fund over its controversial operations in Indonesia.
This is not the first time Norway has taken an ethical stance on the sort of companies in which it invests the country’s money. Ten months ago, the Norwegian finance ministry pulled $13 million worth of shares out of another British mining corporation, Vedanta Resources, over its record on human rights violations and environmental abuse.
Now Norway has sold off its £500 million stake held in Rio Tinto through its sovereign wealth fund because it is unhappy with the company’s joint venture with Freeport McMoran.
War on Want’s campaigns and policy director Ruth Tanner said: “After Norway’s decision to exclude Vedanta from its pension fund, we welcome the Norwegian government’s move to eject Rio Tinto for similar reasons.
“The Norwegian government has again put its money where its mouth is to ensure a real ethical investment policy. More and more funds are withdrawing investment in notorious mining corporations.
“Now other funds should follow Norway’s example. It underlines the need for the UK Government to make all British firms accountable for their operations abroad.”
Rio Tinto is no stranger to controversy. Campaigners have for years accused the company of breaching the human rights of indigenous peoples, of preventing workers from joining trade unions, of enjoying cosy relationships with dictators such as Franco, Pinochet and Suharto and of causing long-term environmental damage at its sites around the world. In the 1970s the company, then called Rio Tinto Zinc, was a byword for all that was unacceptable about buccaneering Western capitalism.
More recently, in its report Fanning the Flames, published last November, War on Want revealed that Rio Tinto earned a staggering $122 million in 2006 from its stake in the Grasberg copper mine.
But the ethics council of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund decided that those profits did not outweigh their concerns over the serious abuse of the human rights of local people and the environmental contamination at the Grasberg complex – the world’s biggest gold mine, and third largest copper mine – in West Papua.
Norway has also decided that other British firms including BAE Systems and the support services group Serco – because of its involvement with the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston – are also too unethical to invest in.
War on Want is also questioning Gordon Brown’s decision to include Rio Tinto in a business anti-poverty coalition to the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals summit with other firms it says has dubious records such as Anglo American, WalMart and Coca Cola.
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