Swedish pension fund blacklist five Chinese companies due to the Paris Agreement

The Swedish pension fund AP7 has on 8 December updated its black list and added a total of seven new companies including five Chinese coal-fired power companies, the fund recently announced.

The pension fund AP7’s black list is updated twice a year, in June and in December, and according to the fund, of the seven new blacklisted companies, five are blacklisted due to the Paris Agreement. All five companies are Chinese and include China Power International Development Ltd, China Shenhua Energy Company Ltd, Huadian Power International Corp Ltd, Shanxi Lu’An Environmental Energy Development Co. Ltd, and TBEA Co. Ltd

AP7 is part of Sweden’s pension authority and currently, a total of 93 companies are blacklisted and excluded from the fund’s investments. The purpose of blacklisting is to persuade companies that do not act responsibly to change their behavior.

“AP7 invests in the companies that accept in an acceptable way the requirements of the international conventions that Sweden has signed and which are expressed in the UN Global Compact’s ten principles, which describe companies’ responsibility for human rights, working conditions, the environment, and anti-corruption. AP7 also blacklists companies that participate in the development and production of nuclear weapons. As of the review in December 2016, the Paris Agreement to the UN Climate Convention is one of the standards on which the analysis is based,” the fund said in the statement.

Since December 2020, companies with a large absolute climate impact in coal have been blacklisted with expansion plans for their fossil fuel operations. The focus is on coal companies as research has shown that decommissioning coal as an energy source is the single most important measure to curb climate change.

The other two companies that are now blacklisted are Finnish Wärtsilä Corporation for involvement in the production of components for nuclear weapons and Ratch Group Public Co. Ltd. based on inadequate human rights management and compensation in connection with a collapsed hydropower plant in Laos.