The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund has decided to divest from French conglomerate Bolloré, the target of long-running allegations of human rights violations, sexual violence and labor rights abuses at plantations in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The decision followed a recommendation issued in 2024 by the ethics council of Norway’s $2.2 trillion Government Pension Fund Global, which advised divesting from Bolloré-affiliated companies based on documentation of poor working conditions, gender-based violence and harassment at oil palm plantations in Cameroon. The allegations were against the Socfin Group, a Luxembourg-based holding company in which Bolloré has significant shares.
The pension fund had engaged with Bolloré for two years before divesting.
In its recently published 2025 responsible investment report, Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the fund, said that “after [attempts] at engagement, the Executive Board decided in 2025 to exclude the companies based on the recommendation of the Council on Ethics from 2024.”
The Government Pension Fund Global held a 0.4% stake in Bolloré, worth about $70 million, as of June 30, 2025. Bloomberg reports that, by the end of 2025, it no longer owned any shares.
“The world’s biggest pension fund is basically saying that whatever Socfin is doing on their plantations, whatever the governments try doing with their due diligence laws — it is not good enough,” Silva Lieberherr from HEKS, a Swiss NGO that works on land rights, climate justice and humanitarian disasters, told Mongabay, adding that such action highlights “how problematic the plantation economy is.
Bolloré has come under scrutiny for Socfin’s operational practices in Africa and Southeast Asia, including allegations of land grabbing, lack of free, prior and informed consent from local communities, poor labor conditions, sexual harassment on plantations in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon, and environmental damage.
Socfin controls 370,000 hectares (914,000 acres) of oil palm and rubber plantations in 10 countries across Africa and Southeast Asia.
The decision by the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund to divest from Bolloré has been hailed as a success by local and international civil society organizations that have documented problems around Socfin’s operations for more than a decade.
Bolloré was also previously dropped by the biggest Swiss pension fund, BVK, after a recommendation from the Swiss Association for Responsible Investments (SVVK-ASIR). The association alleged that Bolloré failed to resolve issues around land grabbing, environmental damage and complicity in human rights violations on Socfin-run oil palm and rubber plantations in 2023.
Lieberherr said it’s not clear how much divestments like these hurt the companies themselves, but it does send a signal to other investors. “These investors — the Swiss SVVK, then BVK and now the Norwegians — increasingly see a risk in investing in Socfin. And this is significant.”
Bolloré didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment, while the Government Pension Fund Global told Mongabay it didn’t have any comments on the divestment decision.
Banner image: Oil palm kernels at Socfin’s Sierra Leonean plantation. Image courtesy of Maja Hitij.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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