Recent Activity

• 

  Nevada Divestment

  urrently the Nevada Public Employee Retirement System has roughly 1.3 million dollars invested into 2 companies that are listed as "Highest Offenders" on the Sudan Divestment Task Force list of offending companies. These companies are Alstom and Lundin Petroleum.
  
  Alstom is participating in a hydroelectric dam project designed to bring power to the ruling elite and their supporters in Sudans capital, Khartoum. The project has forcibly displaced 50,000 local Sudanese, violated at dozens of international environmental standards, and its actions have resulted in the killing of local tribes protesting the project. Alstom has failed act to counter the terrible harm it is doing by supporting this power project.
  
  Lundin Petroleum is based in Sweden and they provide service to government of Sudan to assist in the extraction, production, and refinement of Sudanese oil. In turn, 70% of revenue generated from these oil operations gets funneled into the Sudanese military, which then helps carry out the Darfur genocide.

  hese investments constitute an estimated 0.06% of the total assets of PERS’ portfolio, an amount that could be responsibly divested and reinvested in similar equities with match or exceeding performances.
  
  PERS has respectfully declined requests to divest claiming that to do so would be a violation of their “fiduciary duty” as defined by the Nevada State Constitution. However, as evidenced through other states that have adopted this policy, divestment from Sudan with its small scope and fiscal prudence has not been found to violate fiduciary duty.

  The public employees of the state of Nevada, police officers, firefighters, and teachers included, should not have their future retirements funded by the profits of companies that are complacent to such horrible human rights violations.

  In an effort to persuade PERS to divest before the upcoming legislative session in Nevada we are circulating a letter at both a congressional as well as state level and we have also started a online petition at;

  http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/tell-nevada-to-stop-funding-the-genocide-in-darfur

  Please sign our petition and help us to convince Nevada to stop funding genocide.

  Thank you.
  

  Posted 28 Jun 08 in Darfur Forum