Islington Council has continued its purge of the pension fund of assets tied to Russia.
A statement from the council issued on 4 March said that Councillor Paul Convery (Labour) told a meeting of the pensions subcommittee on 14 March that the funds held £2.6 million worth of investments in Russian companies.
Cllr Convery said: “We have taken some very speedy decisions to get out of Russian investments and paradoxically it hasn’t been difficult to do because selling those investments is just not going to happen. These really are truly stranded assets.”
Cllr Joana Marfoh, told the meeting that a further half a million had to be written off from the in-house fund because of holdings in Evraz, a steel manufacturing and mining company. Sanctioned oligarch and Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich owns 29% of Evraz; the company’s board of directors recently resigned over his involvement with the company.
Cllr Convery said that it was unlikely that there were any more ties, but that the council would conduct further due diligence to verify. Cllr Convery added: “Sure we have no connections with the list of named individuals aka oligarchs that have been identified by EU, UK and US authorities as now being sanctioned individuals.”
On 24 February, the day tanks rolled across the Russian border, the council’s renewable infrastructure manager cancelled the small contracts that were held with Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy company in which Putin himself is reported to hold shares.
Cllr Convery added that: “I noticed the possibility that through private debt, there may be some companies [the council has holdings with] that have got subsidiaries with interests in manufacturing plants, and doubtless those will go the same way – that they will be written down or that the companies will be wound up and the investments written off.”
The Islington council pension fund is valued at £1.66 billion, so the Russian holdings represent less than 0.1% of the value. However, Cllr Convery warned that the rising cost of energy and other economic shocks arising from the conflict and the sanctions meant that “with the effective isolation of the Russian Federation’s economy there may well be a lot of unpredicted risks.”
