My university pension funds motorway through world heritage site
Yes the USS (university) pension is funding a company involved with the M3, the Irish Motorway that is going through Tara, one of the most important prehistoric landscapes in the world…so I am funding this destruction!
If like me you have a bit of USS action going on (I am not convinced that pensions are going to exist when I retire….we are all going to be living in a desert and fighting Tina Turner for the last tanker of biofuel), you might want to complain like me.
If you are in a political party allied to the gobshites governing in the Dail, please let them know as well…click below
TaraWatch wrote today to the UK universities pension fund, Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), who are institutional investors in Cintra, the subsidiary of Ferrovial, who are building the M3 motorway, to inform them of the ethical investment issues involved with the Hill of Tara and to ask for stakeholder engagement.The Universities Superannuation Scheme is a pension scheme in the United Kingdom. Its members include academic and academic-related staff (including senior administrative staff) in certain United Kingdom universities. It claims to be “the second largest pension scheme in the UK by fund size.”
If socialist unity is against it it can’t be all bad.
Comment by Frank — 12 March, 2009 @ 8:56 pm
I don’t know if you are also a member of UNISON, but if so you are supporting the most autocratic government this country has ever seen, with limits on our personal freedom that are the envy of every tinpot dictator in the world.
Still, all in the name of fighting terrorism so mustn’t grumble eh ?
Comment by Rob Atkins — 12 March, 2009 @ 8:58 pm
USS is one of the big pension schemes usually held up as being reasonably good on SRI (socially responsible investment issues), which perhaps just goes to show how appalling the others are. In fact this FOE report (admmittedly a few years old now)placed it in the top 5 of UK pension funds on SRI issues. Until we move beyond the ‘primary fiduciary duty’ obligation placed upon trustees,ie you have to consider what will make the most money above everything else, which fund managers use to excuse any and every investment, we won’t make much progress.
I sit as a trustee on Lewisham Council’s pension fund and it is exceedingly frustrating to be endlessly fobbed off on SRI issues by fund managers, be it Burma investments, the arms trade or as was the case yesterday, a suggestion that we consider diversifying our portfolio to include ‘infrastructure’. I pointed out that probably meant investing in the expansion of Heathrow, which the Council recently passed a motion opposing, as well as motorways and other dodgy carbon guzzling activities. All rather depressing.
Comment by Sue Luxton — 12 March, 2009 @ 10:06 pm
thanks Sue for your work on pensions! They are all crashing at present due to the markets as well.
Comment by Derek Wall — 12 March, 2009 @ 10:22 pm