Harvard Keeps Stake In Tatneft

Harvard’s ownership in a Russian oil holding company with purported links to Sudan have remained constant since the University's last Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing in February.

Harvard still controls 48,100 shares in the company OAO Tatneft, according to the University’s most recent 13F filing with the SEC last Thursday.

In its 2003 Annual Report, filed with the SEC in July of last year, Tatneft officials wrote that “we participate or intend to participate in projects in...Sudan, where both we and Russia have strong historical ties, subject to compliance with applicable international sanctions regimes.”

A December 2005 Yale Law School report on companies doing business in Sudan found that Tatneft had been “directly implicated in business dealings that provided weapons to the Sudanese government.”

Many universities and other institutional investors with large endowments have already divested from Tatneft.

In April, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System decided to divest from five firms linked to the Sudanese genocide, including Tatneft. In March, the University of California Board of Regents unanimously voted to divest from a similar group of nine companies operating in Sudan.

Yale University, Amherst College, and Brown University have also enacted similar divestment plans, which have all included Tatneft as one of the target companies.

The California Public Employee’s Retirement System, a prominent institutional fund with more than $200 billion in its portfolio, is also reconsidering its ownership in firms with ties to Sudan, the Los Angeles Times reported last month.

Harvard has already divested from two companies that have ties to the Sudanese government. In April of last year, the University announced it would divest from Beijing-based PetroChina, following student protests and petitions. Earlier this year, University President Lawrence H. Summers said that Harvard would sell off its shares in another Chinese oil company, Sinopec.

But some students are unhappy with Harvard’s divestment policy.

“It’s time to stop focusing on individual companies,” wrote Sabine J. Ronc ’07, co-founder of the Harvard Darfur Action Group, in an e-mail.

Quoting from a petition for divestment from Sudan signed by over 1200 members of the Harvard community last March, Ronc said that “Harvard needs ‘permanent and systematic ethical investment protocols, to ensure that Harvard will not hold investments in any corporation whose assets are of strategic importance to a government complicit in genocide.’”

Harvard’s ownership in Tatneft is not as large relative to that of major investment banks and institutional money managers, such as Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase and Co., who are listed as the number one and number two shareholders respectively, according to Yahoo Finance.

Deustche Bank owns approximately 1.4 million shares, according to an SEC filing from December 2005, placing the value of their position at $156 million as of yesterday.

Harvard’s 48,100 shares were valued at $5.36 million as of yesterday.

Harvard’s financial ties to Sudan may not all be known, because the University is not obliged to report to the SEC its holdings of shares that trade on foreign exchanges.

Many of the companies doing business in Sudan are traded on foreign exchanges.

Tatneft officials could not be reached for comment at their Moscow offices yesterday.

University spokesman John D. Longbrake did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment yesterday.

—Staff writer Alexander H. Greeley can be reached at agreeley@fas.harvard.edu.