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Backer, Larry Catá, Sovereign Investing and Markets-Based Transnational Rule of Law Building: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund in Global Markets

“By 2009 the NSWF was reported to own about 1% of global stocks and 2.25% of every listed European company.”

“The Fund is to be used not merely to protect and increase the value of the Fund itself, but to influence behaviors among the pool of potential targets of investment.”

“The objectives also contribute to the complex relationship between law and norm, between state regulatory policy and state projections of power through active participation in private markets, and between national legal structures and the internationalization of behavior standards.”

“Responsible investing is not constructed merely to produce the highest achievable returns, but also to bend that objective to other Norwegian political objectives.”

“The Norges Bank may not acquire more than ten percent of the voting shares of an enterprise. Unlike other SWFs, the NSWF does not aspire to be a controlling shareholder, just an influential one. Additionally, the NSWF may not invest in domestic companies or in fixed income instruments issued by governments.”

“Private in form, active ownership provides a method for the transposition of national policy onto the operations of companies over which the Norwegian state has no legal claim to control. Additionally, this projection of public power through shareholding also appears to open a back channel to communication with other states.”

“The NSWF does not merely lobby the companies in which it has an interest, it takes the position that its stakeholding gives it a means of lobbying states for changes in their legal regimes to conform to those that Norway prefers.”

“Norwegian preferences themselves seek to universalize the Norwegian legal order by seeking to incorporate (and transpose) international law and norms onto Norwegian regulatory space, and thus onto the domestic legal orders of foreign states (whether or not the foreign states have embraced those international norms).”

The fund is only the tip of the iceberg. Norway’s PR game is absolutely stunning.

Their extensive (and curious) involvement ranges from importing Jewish prisoners to build infrastructure during WWII, later secretly moving thousands of the bodies of those same victims using paper/asphalt bags as bodybags, to deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil for the benefit of Norwegian Salmon, and so much more.

It’s a wild ride — buckle up.