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Arizona divests from BlackRock over firm’s ESG policies (2022)
| Environmental, social, and corporate governance |
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| • What is ESG? • Enacted ESG legislation • Arguments for and against ESG • Opposition to ESG • Federal ESG rules • ESG legislation tracker • Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's weekly ESG newsletter |
On December 8, Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee (R) announced that the state’s Investment Risk Management Committee had completed its review of BlackRock – including Larry Fink’s own letters – and had decided to proceed with removing its funds from BlackRock’s management because of the firm’s ESG positioning:
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Arizona is forging ahead with its plan to pull the state's funds from BlackRock due to concerns over the massive investment firm's push for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies that have led other states to take similar actions. Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee said in a statement released Thursday that the state treasury's Investment Risk Management Committee (IRMC) began to assess the relationship between the state's trust fund and BlackRock in late 2021. "Part of the review by IRMC involved reading the annual letters by CEO Larry Fink, which in recent years, began dictating to businesses in the United States to follow his personal political beliefs," Yee wrote. "In short, BlackRock moved from a traditional asset manager to a political action committee. Our internal investment team believed this moved the firm away from its fiduciary duty in general as an asset manager." In response to those findings, Yee noted that Arizona began to divest over $543 million from BlackRock money market funds in February 2022 and "reduced our direct exposure to BlackRock by 97%" over the course of the year. Yee added that Arizona "will continue to reduce our remaining exposure in BlackRock over time in a phased in approach that takes into consideration safe and prudent investment strategy that protects the taxpayers." Although the state will continue to hold some BlackRock stock through shares in a passive index of the top 1,500 American corporations, Arizona will have "minimal direct exposure" to BlackRock amounting to "less than 1 tenth of one percent of our total assets under management" as of the end of November. Yee said that Arizona intends to vote its shares in the index in an effort to "change the political activism of BlackRock."[1] |
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See also
- Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)
- Economy and Society: Ballotpedia's ESG newsletter
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
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