Environment Agency invested £15m in ‘forever chemicals’

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Jho@feddit.uk⁩ to ⁨unitedkingdom@feddit.uk⁩

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/environment-agency-england-pension-fund-invested-pfas-forever-chemicals/?

My TL;DR:

The Environment Agency has, in the past, issued warnings against PFAS (“forever chemicals”), a family of carcinogenic chemicals which can cause “almost indefinite environmental contamination”.

According to the Environment Agency, their “extreme persistence… could lead to long-term exposure of both people and wildlife”, and some of the chemicals “have also been shown to cause harmful effects in humans”.

Despite this, the Environment Agency’s pension fund has invested nearly £15m of taxpayers’ money directly into chemical firms that produce PFAS.

A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said its pension fund was “legally separated from the operational and regulatory functions carried out by the Environment Agency” and said that its third party managers controlled what made up its portfolio.

The chair of the EA’s Pensions Committee, Robert Gould, was the former Conservative leader of Dorset County Council until 2017. He has claimed that the pension fund’s approach is influenced by “the desire to act in the wider public interest”.

Recent testing found that all but one water company in England already had potentially toxic levels of PFAS in their water supplies.

source

Comments

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florge@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Feel like this it probably more on the pension fund managers than anything else. I remember reading that Saudi ARAMCO is wholly owned by two investment vehicles which are called something obvious like Big Oil Investing Co, but because these two companies are only an investment companies and fund managers do so little due diligence, a lot of ESG oriented investments end up indirectly investing in Saudi oil.

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- Jho@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m not really sure how much I blame EA in all this. Honestly, I don’t really understand how pension funds work.
  
  Does EA have a lot of choice on what pension fund to use? Does any pension fund invest wholly ethically?
  
  It’s certainly an issue that £15m that is given to the EA is ultimately used for purposes which go directly against what the EA does. There’s something going wrong which needs to be fixed, but I wouldn’t know what the answer would be.
  
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voight@hexbear.net ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Please, think of all the straws we were able to lubricate 14% more efficiently at 30% reduced cost

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leaskovski@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fuck me... Really!!? Pension fund? Seriously, like the EA has control over what the fund managers invest in.

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- Jho@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sure, but regardless, £15m which was taken from taxpayers to fulfil a particular purpose was instead used to fulfil a purpose which is the complete antithesis of that.
  
  I don’t know if the blame lies with EA, but ultimately it was the EA’s money that was invested. Something has gone wrong which needs to be fixed.
  
  Like, is it as simple as choosing a different fund to invest in, or are they all as bad as each other? If it’s the latter then we need to reform how pension funds work.
  
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  - leaskovski@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The fund manager is Capita... they aren't going to last long anyway, because they had a massive data breach last year, so I expect they will be loosing their contract to manage the fund. Those wankers are the ones to be blamed for this, not the EA.
    
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