A large Danish fund manager, AkademikerPension, announced on Wednesday that it will disinvest from Israeli state assets over the war against Hamas in Gaza, and the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria.
“In AkademikerPension, we take a systematic approach to monitoring sovereigns against our Policy for Responsible Investments. In this case, our monitoring has identified violations of human rights, and we have therefore decided to exclude the State of Israel and state-controlled enterprises from our investment universe,” the manager’s chief executive officer, Jens Munch Holst, said in a statement.
The statement did not detail Israel investments hitherto handled by AkademikerPension, but did say that “as of today, AkademikerPension holds no positions in the State of Israel or in Israeli state-owned companies.”
Investing some $24.77 billion globally, AkademikerPension manages the pensions of Danish teachers and university lecturers. It said the war was not in accordance with international humanitarian principles, Reuters reported.
The exclusion follows the recent divestments by Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. “This comes as an assessment of the state of Israel’s ability to uphold human rights,” CEO Jens Munch Holst told Reuters.
Norway’s wealth fund stopped short of announcing a blanket boycott of Israel but announced in August that it had divested from 11 Israeli companies that it said did not meet its “equity benchmark.”
It also said it planned to move the other 50 companies in which it invests in-house.
“We are terminating contracts with external managers in Israel,” the fund’s investment management announced.
