Submitted by patrick on Sat, 08/01/2009 - 23:15
Posted in
Headline: "Catholic church invests in tobacco, arms and birth control pills".
Sounds too unbelievable to be true? Well, not entirely. According to this article on spiegel.de, the German Pax bank, one of the four catholic church banks in North Rhine-Westphalia did exactly that.
According to the article, the following investments were made:
- In march, 158,867 Euro were invested in stocks of Wyeth pharmaceuticals. A drug company, which among other things produces birth control pills.
- Also in march, 577,970 Euro went to BAE systems, an arms manufacturer with an impressive product portfolio.
- Furthermore, 870,950 Euro were held in shares of British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco.
All three investments violate Pax Bank's own code of ethics, a written statement of conduct, highlighting Christian values as guiding principle for doing business. The financial institute prominently refers to this document in order to advertise it's services. Given the strong emphasis on that promise and the fact, that the ethics advisory board currently consists of 14 people, clients might not be very happy with this discovery.
Update: Bank manager Hinzen and CEO Berndorff apologized for the incident, which apparently happened due to the operative business being outsourced to Union Investment.