January 18th, 2010
In March of last year, financial services organization TIAA-CREF announced its intention to increase pressure on five companies that still maintained ties with the Sudanese government and its involvement in the genocide in Darfur to reconsider the relationships. During the later half of 2009, the organization met with the companies in question – PetroChina, CNPC Hong Kong, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, Sinopec, and PETRONAS – to discuss the genocide in Sudan and methods of confronting it. According to TIAA-CREF’s press release, after meetings with four of the companies yielded “insufficient progress to warrant continued dialogue,” the organization announced that it had “sold its holdings in these companies across all funds and accounts as of December 31, 2009.”
The one company TIAA-CREF retained as a result of a productive and open discussion was PETRONAS. “We have not divested from PETRONAS, which has acknowledged our concerns and engaged in dialogue about how it might address them,” stated Roger Ferguson, Jr., chief executive at TIAA-CREF. In deciding which companies to retain, TIAA-CREF considered “the gravity of TIAA-CREF’s concerns in Sudan, the likelihood of successful dialogue with target companies and a conclusion that divestment would have an insignificant impact on the financial performance of participants’ portfolios.”