If official bodies want to “capitalize” something in the future, then a healthy dose of skepticism is usually required. After all, if you really do something, you don’t need to trumpet it out loud. And anyway, capitalizing sounds more like patient paperwork than actual action. Perhaps it was per se suspicious when the leading Federal Ministry of the Interior announced last May that they wanted climate protection and sustainability in future for large federal pension funds – “capitalize“.
Almost a year later, it is apparent that at most a small hit seems to have succeeded: Public documents suggest that the state’s capital managers are still investing the money from three pension funds and a care pot in coal and oil stocks, including, for example, shares of the controversial oil company Exxon Mobile.
The four financial pots involve reserves of 46.5 billion euros, which most Germans have probably never heard of. So wants the federal government with its “pension fund” and the “pension reserve” will cover the pensions of civil servants in a few years, with the “pension fund of the Federal Employment Agency” that of the employees there and with the “nursing care fund” Pad the nursing care funds. Almost 80 percent of the funds’ money is currently in interest investments, but a little more than 20 percent is also in shares.
The federal government does not actually want to disclose the exact composition of the share portfolios “in order to rule out possible market manipulation,” according to the Federal Ministry of the Interior. At best, the ministry officials have revealed the 20 most important stock positions from around 140 stocks in the past. The transparency of at least a little more than half of the equity investments came unexpectedly: The index provider Euronext has probably inadvertently disclosed a detailed list of shares of some of the federal investments on its website. Around a third of the equity share of the four funds is ultimately to be assigned to an index with the unwieldy title “Euronext VE ESG World Select 75 Bund/ SV Index” follow, for which the funds even fall back on the huge data set of the sustainability researchers of the renowned agency Vigeo Eiris.
However, this does not lead to a cross-green investment policy, after all, the List of members of the course basket several conspicuous companies at the same time: The index includes the oil multinational Exxon Mobil, which critics have been working on for years and where only a hedge fund last year brought climate representatives into decisive positions. The portfolio also includes coal mining company Anglo American, oil drilling company Canadian Natural Resources and US oil pipeline company Enbridge. Marathon Petroleum, on the other hand, is involved in every part of the oil business, from refineries to pipelines to gas stations. “If the federal government does not actively exclude such fossil companies, the state stock transactions will remain on an anti-climate course,” says Mathias von Gemmingen from the climate organization Fossil Free Berlin.
Fossil energies are “bridging technologies” for the Ministry of the Interior
Calculations by the SZ based on information from the Federal Ministry of the Interior show that the shares of the five coal and oil companies are currently worth almost 75 million euros. Since the federal government wants to follow the Euronext index with even more money by the end of the year, this sum should even increase.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior does not want to deviate from the controversial investment practice. An investment committee made up of four ministries and four external members discussed the sustainability concept of the plants intensively: Banned weapons, human rights violations, tobacco and nuclear power have been out since the middle of last year expressly taboo – not fossil plants. On request, the Ministry of the Interior announced that fossil fuels “are still bridging technologies on which both the economy and society are currently dependent”. Some of the fossil companies are even in a transformation process towards green energies, which should not be punished.
A line of argument with which at least some Alliance Greens in the federal government should have a problem. Green Party leader Ricarda Lang warned a few days ago that coal was “not a bridging technology.” And just a few years ago, a Green MP, of all people, was interested in one written request conspicuously critical for the investments of federal plants. Today, the questioner from back then is Federal Foreign Minister.