This evening, The University Times revealed that Trinity has at least €8 million invested in companies directly involved with fossil fuel activities, despite promising to become “the first university on the island of Ireland to divest its oil, coal and gas investments”.
The €8 million figure is a sum of investments in two funds passively managed by Irish Life Investment Managers: MSCI World Ex Fossil Fuels Ex Tobacco and Global High Yield Equity Ex Fossil Fuels Ex Tobacco.
Records of the companies in which College has shares were released to this newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act.
The funds make up 66.5 per cent of a €222,834,702 million Endowment Fund. The rest of the fund comprises College’s infrastructure assets, investment property assets, the Bridge Investment Fund, cash on deposit and net working capital.
Companies were determined to be directly involved in fossil fuel activity if they partook in the extraction, refining or transport of fossil fuels, if they produced energy from fossil fuels or owned fossil fuel power plants, or if they were involved in the building, designing or provision of fossil fuel energy services.
Companies were also included if they provided significant funding to the fossil fuel industry, or had subsidiaries whose primary activity was in the industry.
Holding companies were only included if their assets were primarily involved directly in fossil fuel activities. For example, while the holding company for Irish Life Investment Managers was not included because its investments span almost all industries with no particular focus on fossil fuels, Power Assets Holdings was included because all of its assets are in the energy sector with at least eight out of 15 publicly known to be directly involved in fossil fuels.
The 85 companies does not include companies that use fossil fuels to create their products or run their businesses, such as airlines or producers of single-use plastics, companies which were previously, but not currently, involved in fossil fuels and utility companies that sell fossil fuel-derived energy, but are not involved in any power generation or fossil fuel transport etc.
The University Times also distinguished between companies directly involved in the extraction of fossil fuels. A similar methodology was required to make these classifications. For a company to be included, it must be directly involved in the extraction of fossil fuels. Direct involvement in fossil fuel extraction was defined as owning companies or infrastructure that is used to extract fossil fuels, assisting with and optimising the extraction process. It also included companies with expertise in gases, explosives, mining and extraction infrastructure, companies that identify the existence of fossil fuel reserves.
Companies excluded from these criteria included oil-field services or the equivalent for coal and natural gas extraction, unless a definitive tie to the actual extraction process could be made and companies with likely involvement in extraction operations, but no publicly available information could be found to confirm – for example, electricity utilities that did not specifically account for the origins of their power.
The records released to The University Times provided the size of each investment as a percentage to two decimal places of the greater fund. Thus, some investments were recorded as “0.00 per cent”.
The fact that percentages were only recorded to two decimal places likely means the valuation of each holding is off by a random error. Thus, while any large-scale addition of these values cannot be completely accurate, there should be no systematic error in either direction.
