Here’s the (Secret) List of Norway’s Oil Stock Divestments

(Bloomberg) -- Norway has now decided which oil stocks its $1.1 trillion sovereign wealth fund will sell. But it doesn’t want to say which ones.

The Finance Ministry announced Tuesday that the fund will, over time, exclude all stocks categorized by index provider FTSE Russell as “Crude Producers.” Some 95 of those companies were included in the fund’s benchmark index at mid-September, with a value of about $5.9 billion, the ministry said.

But both the ministry and the fund declined to provide an exact list, citing a practice of only divulging holdings in detail at the end of each year. Both also declined to say which stocks the fund held at the end of 2018 that are now included in the FTSE Russell subcategory -- even though the ministry did that as recently as March, when it presented its divestment proposal to Parliament.

Back then, an earlier FTSE Russell category was used that also included refiners and petrochemical companies, contradicting the government’s decision to exclude only upstream companies and creating some confusion. “The experience from the previous round is that publishing such a list confuses more than it clarifies,” the ministry said in an emailed comment on Wednesday.

The ministry also said that FTSE Russell’s category lists and the fund’s holdings change frequently, reducing the relevance of disclosing a list.

Fortunately, FTSE Russell provided its most recent data for the “Oil: Crude Producers” subcategory, updated on Oct. 2 after the latest quarterly review. Crossing that list with the fund’s publicly disclosed holdings at the end of 2018 -- and assuming those haven’t changed -- this would be the stocks that the fund will need to dump:

To contact the reporter on this story: Mikael Holter in Oslo at mholter2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Herron at jherron9@bloomberg.net, Jonas Bergman

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