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German Catholic bank dumps pill, tobacco investments
Aug 3, 2009, 10:12 GMT
Berlin - A German Catholic bank that was revealed to have made indirect investments in companies producing weapons, tobacco and the contraceptive pill said Monday that it had disposed of the 'ethically dubious' shares in question.
Pax Bank, a Cologne-based church investment firm, was revealed by a report in the Spiegel news magazine on Saturday to have been involved in investments worth some 1.6 million euros (2.3 million dollars) in companies including defence giant BAE Systems, British American Tobacco and US pharmaceutical firm Wyeth.
'We made the sale order first thing this morning,' the bank's director Winfried Hinzen told the German Press Agency dpa.
Pax, which had made the investments in conjunction with another church financial organization, Liga Bank, said that the day-to-day running of their investments had been under the control of Union Investment, an asset management firm.
The bank apologized for the 'error.'
Clients of Pax are predominantly ecclesiastical institutions, or those with links to churches such as religious orders, hospitals and charities as well as theology students.
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