North Carolina state treasurer demands BlackRock CEO Larry Fink “resign or be removed” immediately in Friday letter to company’s board of directors.
From Daily Signal:
“As keeper of the public purse, my duty is to manage our investments to ensure that the best interests of those that teach, protect and serve, as well as of our retirees, are always paramount,” North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell says in the letter to BlackRock’s board. “The North Carolina Retirement Systems (NCRS) have approximately $14 billion invested through BlackRock in various active and passive funds, in addition to around $55 million passively invested in BlackRock stocks or bonds,” writes Folwell, a Republican who won reelection in 2020. Folwell cites what he calls Fink’s “pursuit of a political agenda” and his “focus on ESG,” an acronym for so-called environmental, social, and governance policies: Unfortunately, Larry Fink’s pursuit of a political agenda has gotten in the way of BlackRock’s same fiduciary duty. A focus on ESG is not a focus on returns and potentially could force us to violate our own fiduciary duty. Ultimately, Fink’s continued ideological pressure could result in using ESG scores against states and local governments, lowering their credit ratings and thus driving up their cost of borrowing at taxpayers’ expense. This not only concerns me as the state treasurer but as chair of the North Carolina State Banking Commission and the Local Government Commission.
