Profs Back Sudan Petition

Harvard sold more than half its shares of PetroChina, the Chinese oil company with ties to the ongoing genocide in Sudan, between June 30 and Sept. 30 of this year, according to papers filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The University’s holdings in PetroChina have drawn criticism from human rights activists who say the company’s close links to oil ventures in Sudan have helped finance that government’s slaughter of its own people. A petition calling on Harvard to divest its shares of PetroChina- had garnered the support of 38 faculty members and 214 students as of yesterday evening.

Harvard owned 34,500 shares of PetroChina on Sept. 30, according to the filing, down from 72,000 shares three months earlier. Those 34,500 shares would be worth $1.8 million today. The sale of half its PetroChina shares occurred at least three weeks before The Crimson first reported the connection between Harvard’s holdings and the Sudanese genocide.

University President Lawrence H. Summers has declined to comment on Harvard’s investment in PetroChina. The Corporation Committe on Shareholder Responsibility—comprised of three members of the University’s highest governing body and advised by a council of students, faculty and alumni—is charged with setting Harvard’s policy on investments.

“If they want to tell us, do not invest in PetroChina, then we won’t,” said Jack Meyer, president of the Harvard Management Company, which invests the University endowment. While last quarter’s filings indicate Harvard owned the stock as of Sept. 30, Meyer declined to say whether Harvard still owns PetroChina today, citing longstanding policy at the managment company.

Benjamin B. Collins ’06, who helped found the petition to divest from PetroChina two weeks ago, said several professors had signed on over the weekend.

“We’d been e-mailing various departments and graduate schools for the past week or so, but once we got a critical mass of about 10, faculty felt a lot more comfortable signing it,” Collins said in an interview yesterday.

Collins said they planned to solicit individual faculty—including “more high-profile” professors—in coming weeks. The petition is online at www.harvarddivest.com.

Meanwhile, a coalition of black members of Congress, Jewish leaders, the Salvation Army and other Christian groups is pressing pension funds in several states, including New York and California, to shed their holdings in stocks with links to the Sudanese regime.

Activists have also begun to criticize another Chinsese oil firm, Sinopec, which resumed their ventures in Sudan last week after cutting its ties with the government there several years ago. Harvard owned 10,000 shares of Sinopec worth $205,000 on Sept. 30, according to its latest filing.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.