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Nine firms are ‘weeded out’ by a Norwegian wealth fund due to ESG risks.

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The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway’s $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund, has performed a risk-based screening of 442 companies this year, finding that it will not participate in nine of them, the fund announced on Tuesday.

“Our pre- screening builds on and strengthens our long-standing work with risk-based divestments. It’s about weeding out companies that we do not want to be invested in,” said Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management.

The fund stated that it would not name the companies that were impacted. The Norwegian fund has a global portfolio of 9,100 companies.

It bases its own reference index on the FTSE Global All Cap index from FTSE Russell. As new equities are added to the FTSE index; the fund can screen out companies that it does not want in its own portfolio due to ESG risks.

“During the second half of the year, we have also identified an additional 65 companies with high sustainability risk that we will consider following up through our investment processes and in our ownership work,” the fund said.

Story by : Norvisi Mawunyegah