Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about sovereign funds and how they can drive ethical conduct in their investment companies.

I'm in Chile, Oslo, and my guest is Johann Andresen.

Johann chairs the Council on Ethics at the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global.

That's the Norwegian Sovereign Fund with over a trillion dollars in assets.

It's the largest single-mandate fund in the world, investing oil and gas revenue for future generations of Norwegians.

Johan, thank you for joining me.

Well, thank for being here.

Can you just describe for people who might not be familiar with the Norwegian sovereign fund,

the role of the fund and the role of the Council on Ethics that you chair?

Well, it's been decided by Parliament, really, that with all our fortune, all our wealth,

we should try to be responsible in the sense that we should not be invested in companies

that violate certain universal norms.

So therefore, Parliament gave a mandate to the Ministry of Finance to write up some guidelines.

Those guidelines is something that both the Central Bank, which oversees the fund

and we, the Council on Ethics, really gives us our mandate.

Now, what is sort of peculiar about the Council on Ethics to many

is that we are independent.

So we're independent of the Ministry of Finance.

We're independent of the Central Bank.. We're independent of the central bank.

And we have our own set of criteria upon which we try to assess the risk that companies are engaged in certain kind of norm breaking, be it, yeah, corruption is one of the ones we're going to talk about,

but there are also others, human rights, damage to the environment, emissions, climate,

...