companies 3.1
if they have invested in the company you’re interested in. If you want to find out what a particular pension or investment fund owns, go to the website of the company or organisation that is managing the fund and look for the accounts or investment portfolios of the particular fund you are looking for. How many of their investments they disclose will depend on the fund. If you can’t find the details on their website, try a web search for the exact name of the fund in full, as sometimes business websites will give summaries of their investments. You could also try calling them up and asking if there is a list you could see. If you are looking at a fund for particular employees - for example a local government employees’ pension fund - you could ask the employees to ask for you, if you can get in touch with them. Contacting their union might be a good place to start. Following the chain... As companies can themselves be owned by other companies, you may need to look through the ownership details of a chain of companies before you get to the ultimate owners of the company (see section 2.3). This information may be in the company’s accounts (see page 54) so check them first. But things get difficult if people are investing through ‘shell’ companies to deliberately hide their identity. Companies or individuals invest through another company they own, so that the name of the company shows up on the official documents instead of their names. The shell companies they
Case Study: Divestment
campaigns
Palestinians and Palestine solidarity activists have worked to identify the shareholders of the companies profiting from illegal Israeli settlements, in order to put pressure on them to withdraw their investments. They have sifted through company publications, annual returns and corporate news sources and databases to put together an increasingly comprehensive list, to track exactly where the profits made from Israeli’s occupation of Palestine go. Because of this pressure, several investors have sold millions of pounds worth of shares in companies such as Caterpillar, which makes the bulldozers used to knock down people’s homes. At the time of writing, Dutch pension fund PGGM has just divested tens of millions of Euros from five Israeli banks in response to public pressure. are investing through often only exist ‘on paper’ and are mostly registered in countries or states with minimal disclosure requirements, meaning you can’t see their annual return or the documents you need to find out who owns them. People can also use trusts to hide their identity (see page 26). For trusts, it may only be the name of the trustee – often 66