At least two Danish institutional investors support a shareholder resolution calling for the Nordic region's biggest bank Nordea to stop all financing to companies expanding Arctic oil and gas production due to "environmental risks".
The investors, pension funds Akademiker and Sampension, told Reuters of their voting intentions before the bank's annual general meeting on Tuesday. The activist motion comes at an awkward time, amid the Iran-war-driven oil shock and after the Norwegian Government last year announced plans for increased drilling in Norway's offshore Arctic region.
The resolution targets Norwegian energy companies Equinor, Aker BP and Var Energi, which are invested in Arctic exploration and drilling.
It calls on Nordea to align with its Nordic rivals - Danske Bank, Swedbank, Handelsbanken, Nykredit and OP Financial Group - in stopping lending to companies that are expanding their oil and gas activities north of the Arctic Circle, the resolution said.
"The vulnerable Arctic ecosystems are at risk of becoming the new centre of Norwegian oil and gas production," said one of the proposal's writers, senior advisor Katrine Ehnhuus of the Nordic Center for Sustainable Finance.
Nordea said it does not provide dedicated finance to expansion of oil and gas or Arctic drilling but will continue to provide funding to certain companies.
"We continue to support a few carefully selected companies that play an important role in ensuring affordable and secure energy supply in Europe," Nordea said in an emailed statement to Reuters.
Nordea is one of 19 banks that participate in a revolving credit facility worth $5 billion to Equinor, which, "serves as a backstop facility for the group's borrowing in the US Commercial Paper market," Equinor said in its debt presentation.
Sampension said they would vote in favour of the resolution because, "certain types of activities appeared to have been excluded," from Nordea's assessment of its exposure to fossil fuel expansion.
"In our assessment of both the proposal and the board of directors' response to the proposal, it appears that the company has not provided shareholders with a sufficiently transparent picture of its activities related to the financing of fossil fuel expansion," Jacob Ehlerth Jorgensen, Head of ESG at Sampension, told Reuters by email.
(Reporting by Anne Kauranen in Helsinki, additional reporting by Nora Buli in Oslo, editing by Andrei Khalip)
