Perhaps the address at Kurfürstenstrasse 87 could be described as the financial center of what is probably the most complicated garbage collection service in the country. The Lenz House there boasts of being one of the most prestigious office addresses in Berlin; the money managers of the public nuclear fund Kenfo manage billions in assets from here. Your “Fund for Financing Nuclear Waste Management” is ultimately intended to provide urgently needed money for the storage of German nuclear waste. But now the fund apparently has a problem of its own with controversial energy technologies in its portfolio.
In investment circles, the fund is actually considered an authority, on a technical level with private money managers. The Kenfo people were not only supposed to manage the power plant operators’ original 24 billion euros, last year the fund was even discussed as a manager of a possible stock pension from the idea book of Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP). But even if the private financial sector looks at the fund and its boss Anja Mikus with admiration, research by the non-governmental organization Urgewald now suggests methodological inconsistencies – especially when it comes to the sensitive topic of sustainability.
According to the legal Investment Guidelines The fund has to “integrate” sustainability criteria into its decisions; Mikus’ team is pursuing one “fact and know-how based approach”. However, this apparently does not necessarily lead to a cross-green investment policy, as an evaluation by Urgewald, which the SZ has previously received, shows: Zur most current disclosure At the end of 2022, the fund invested 771 million euros in stocks and bonds of companies with oil, coal or gas businesses. “That’s three quarters of a billion too much,” says Urgewald representative Anna Lena Samborski.
The list of fossil investments includes, for example, large oil giants such as Total, Shell and BP. Particularly spicy: When BP presented the best results in its company history last year shortly after the Kenfo disclosure deadline, the British oil giant simultaneously scaled down its own environmental ambitions. Instead of wanting to reduce oil and gas production by 40 percent between 2019 and 2030, the group is now satisfied with 25 percent.
However, some smaller positions in the fund raise the even more piquant question of how serious the fund is about its own rules. So the Berliners have money managers in their own Sustainability report clearly stated that they do not invest in oil from tar sands. Unlike traditional oil production, the raw material first has to be removed from a diesel-smelling slag. This often happens with hot steam, which requires a lot of energy. Around six million euros As of the most recent reporting date, the nuclear fund was still in bonds from the Canadian company Enbridge, which at least has tar sands oil in a pipeline transported. Unlike the production of such oil, corresponding pipeline activities are not included in the exclusion, Kenfo said upon request. “Such inconsistencies have been known among experts for years,” says Samborski.
It is easy to explain why such companies can be found in the nuclear fund’s investments: In addition to dark green investment strategies, dozens of shades of green have now become established among investment professionals. In addition to a few hard exclusions, Kenfo apparently relies primarily on the so-called best-in-class strategy Fund paper vicinity. Instead of consistently excluding environmental offenders, the best companies in an industry always come into the fund – but in case of doubt also from controversial industries.
In theory, there are good arguments for remaining involved in fossil fuel companies: “Excluding certain sectors would not reduce the CO₂ emissions of the real economy,” says Kenfo upon request. If shareholders also use their voting rights at general meetings or invite company bosses to bilateral rapport, such a strategy can put pressure on management. At Kenfo, three of the 50 employees currently work in the sustainability area.
About a week ago, the second largest Dutch pension fund PFZW made a surprise move on the markets clear announcement: He had previously thrown 310 oil and gas stocks worth almost three billion euros out of his portfolio and publicly attacked individual companies in the process. “We’ve been talking about it for two years and not enough has changed,” fund chairwoman Joanne Kellerman told the Dutch business broadcaster RTL Z. The nuclear fund managers in Berlin may have noticed.