The Church of England is pressuring the French energy giant TotalEnergies over its decision not to cut ties with Russia after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Church’s pensions board and the manager of its investment fund said they would reconsider their shareholding in the company.
In a joint letter to Patrick Pouyanné, the chief executive of TotalEnergies, the pension board and the Church Commissioners for England said the company should urgently reconsider its position.
The letter pointed out that while TotalEnergies had condemned Russia’s aggression, it had not followed many of its peers in the energy sector, such as BP and Shell, in withdrawing from Russia.
In February, the Church of England announced it had sold all £20m of investments in Russian companies in response to what the archbishops of Canterbury and York described as Vladimir Putin’s “act of evil” in Ukraine.
The Church Commissioners manage a £9.2bn investment fund while the pensions board manages a fund worth £3.7bn.
It was not immediately clear how large a stake the Church’s funds hold in TotalEnergies, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The joint letter follows two French non-governmental organisations – Greenpeace and Les Amis de la Terre (Friends of the Earth) France – saying they planned to take legal action against TotalEnergies over possible human rights abuses unless it cuts business ties with Russia.
Russia represented almost a quarter of TotalEnergies’ reserves and 17% of its combined oil and gas production in 2020, according to company documents.
The activist investor Clearway Capital has also written to the board of TotalEnergies asking it to exit its Russian operations after the invasion of Ukraine.
