The fund has made sustainable investing a more explicit strategy since Nicolai Tangen took over as chief executive late last year. With a portfolio of about 9,000 stocks, the world’s biggest owner of publicly traded companies intends to base future investment decisions on the results of a new ESG pre-screening process.
Norway’s US$1.4 trillion wealth fund has exited hundreds of companies over the past decade to avoid the environmental, social and governance risk it says they represented.
Since 2012, Norges Bank Investment Management has offloaded almost 370 stocks as a result of ESG screening, according to new figures released by the fund on Tuesday. The ultimate goal is to protect the wealth fund from risks that will lead to financial losses, Chief Corporate Governance Officer Carine Smith Ihenacho said in an interview before the latest update on divestments.
