Word: petrochina
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Four years later, the University decided to divest its holdings in PetroChina due to the company’s financial ties to genocide in Darfur. The effect was, even just superficially, quite different—public attention focused on the magnitude and intractability of the problem, and Harvard divested for the fourth time in its history...
Nonetheless, the argument for divestment from PetroChina was much more profound than both general gravitas and the other common argument for divestment, the infliction of financial pain on evildoers. In the second category of divestment campaigns, the demand is that Harvard terminate a direct money flow between the endowment and the finances of injustice, because even just remotely funding evil is morally intolerable...
Having served on the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility during the PetroChina decision, the most important question in deciding to divest from PetroChina was the money flow. Harvard’s investment money went to a company that used that money to purchase oil from a Sudanese oil exploration effort, which in turn used that money to finance the militias that slaughter people. It mattered that it was oil; had PetroChina been in the coffee business and sourced coffee from Sudan, Harvard likely would not have divested—there was no straight line from the coffee export industry...
...broader movement. On apartheid, Gulf oil, and tobacco, other investors followed suit, and Harvard’s move carried large public weight. So far, Harvard’s divestment from Sudan has been largely neglected externally, and progress on Darfur has been slow. But at least as far as PetroChina is concerned, Harvard has done what it can, and we must now look to other institutions to follow suit...
Last year’s PetroChina divestment campaign sparked a campus debate on how politicized, if at all, the Harvard endowment should be. The problem with seeking maximum returns in investments is that companies like PetroChina, Sinopec, Unocal that either indirectly facilitate or are directly complicit in grave human rights abuses remain in Harvard’s portfolio. Fortunately, last year the University agreed that Harvard must ensure that its money is not used to facilitate morally bankrupt activity. Citing President Derek C. Bok’s precedent that divestment is reasonable in “exceptional circumstances...