London pension fund faces backlash over Palestinian rights allegations

According to Middle East eye, the report by "Shake the CIV", a London-wide divestment campaign, was published on Thursday and examines the London Collective Investment Vehicle (LCIV), the investment pool for London-based local government pension schemes.

The pool is owned by the City of London and all 32 London boroughs. More than a fifth of the LCIV's portfolio, over £7bn, is invested in companies "enabling Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights" according to the report.

The LCIV manages the pensions of approximately 700,000 Londoners. It sold its Israeli government bonds for £6.7m last year and has recently said it is assessing its investments in 12 companies, which it has not named.

The report says it currently invests almost £1bn in arms manufacturers - including £10m in Israel's largest arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems, and £228m in British arms company BAE Systems.

The LCIV also invests £5.2bn in technology firms the report accuses of "enabling Israel’s surveillance and control of Palestinians", with over £2.5bn invested in Microsoft.

Last month Microsoft announced it would end its longstanding relationship with Israel's Unit 8200, a surveillance urgency accused of spying on Palestinians and storing the data on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

The LCIV said that £6.5bn of the £7bn cited by the report are "passive strategies" and "managed by third-party fund managers, not under London CIV management and entirely outside the pool's control in terms of any investment decisions".

The report urges the LCIV to "immediately, completely, and permanently divest from all companies complicit in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians."

It says that "if London councillors representing the city’s 32 boroughs had the collective political will, they could make LCIV divest from genocide".

Councillor Liam Shrivastava, who sits on Lewisham Council's pension committee, said: "At stake here are not only the lives of millions of human beings but also local authorities’ right to make democratic decisions about financial matters.

"In the 1980s, many London councils made history by cutting financial ties with apartheid South Africa and recently many have divested from fossil fuels.

"Genocide is the crime of crimes - we have to do whatever we can to stop it."