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Interview with
Johan H. Andresen

owner and chairman of Ferd AS, Chair, Council of Ethics, Norwegian

Government Pension Fund Global, to most known as the Norwegian
Sovereign Fund

During the forum on Business and Human
Rights in Geneva at the end of November, we
had the chance to meet Johan H. Andresen, a
well-known and major actor in the Norwegian

business environment.

It started with his great-great grandfather, who

bought a tobacco factory in 1949, J.Tiedemanns
Tobaksfabrik, and for years their factory was a
major producer of cigarettes and other tobacco
products. The company was later sold, and Mr
Andresen set up Ferd, a private investment

company that has become one of the main
privately owned players in the financial markets
in Scandinavia. He has a reputation for being

clever, honest, humble and straightforward, so now we leave the floor to Mr Andresen,
who kindly replied to all our questions despite his busy schedule.

Q: What is the reason why you are here today? is now more than a trillion U.S. dollars, and there are more
I’m the Chair, Council on Ethics, and our role is to track than 9000 companies in the fund. Therefore, it is a huge
and potentially recommend exclusion or observation from effort just to keep track of them. The Fund has several ways
the Norwegian Sovereign Fund companies that are violating of tracking the companies to see if they behave responsibly.
established international norms, among them, human Our mandate, through our guidelines, is to continuously,
rights. So, this is an important opportunity to be here. I was in a sense, screen the companies through web crawlers,
on the panel yesterday, and this is a way to tell people what through being open to the public and to NGOs, to receive
we are doing, about our guidelines, what we are worried concerns and complaints and perhaps look into them, and
about... perhaps to do in-depth industry studies where we think
We have been here a couple of times before, and it’s both a there is a high risk of norm violations. This concerns
good occasion to understand and an excellent way to meet not only human rights but also environmental damage,
other investors, NGOs and specialists to hear what their corruption and certain products which we should not invest
concerns are. in. The council comprises five appointed members and a
secretariat of eight. We meet every month, and then there
Q: How does this ethics group go about its work? are all the other meetings in between with civil society, with
The Central Bank is the manager of the Fund, which is the companies with which we have a direct dialogue. So this is
future savings of the Norwegian people. The size of the fund a big and comprehensive effort.

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