World’s largest fund divests Chinese clothing brand

Oslo: Norway´s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, will sell off its stake in China's Li Ning over suspicions of forced labour use in the Xinjiang region, the fund's manager said.

Li Ning, a manufacturer and trader of sportswear and equipment, was singled out "due to unacceptable risk that the company contributes to serious human rights violations," Norges Bank, the Norwegian central bank, said in a statement late on Monday.

The decision followed a recommendation from its Council on Ethics, which in an advisory opinion pointed to reports linking Li Ning to "a supplier said to manufacture inside an internment camp".

China is accused of having interned more than a million Uighurs, a Muslim minority living in Xinjiang, in political re-education camps and exploiting them for forced labour.

At the end of 2021, the Norwegian fund, which was then worth 12,340 billion Norwegian kroner ($1,376 billion, 1,264 billion euros), held 0.59 percent of Li Ning shares, valued at nearly 1.5 billion kroner, which it has now sold.

In contrast, it has removed South Korean textile group Hansae Yes24 and Taiwanese Nien Hsing Textile from its watch list -- the step before companies are excluded - because it believed there was no longer reason to suspect systematic labour rights violations in their factories.

Meanwhile, it placed Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier "under observation" over allegations of corruption in six countries over a period of more than ten years (2004-2016).

When it finalised the sale of its transport division to France´s Alstom in early 2021, Bombardier had issued a 250 million euro bank guarantee to the French company to cover expenses related to these cases, the ethics board noted.

Also placed under observation was India´s Adani Ports, because of its business dealings with the junta in Myanmar, and South Korea´s Hyundai Glovis, because of its activities involving the beaching of boats in Pakistan and Bangladesh where they are broken up for scrap.

Finally, the fund also removed San Leon Energy from its blacklist, as the Irish oil company had ended its incriminating activities in Western Sahara.