Investment company Standard Life Aberdeen was created by the merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management in 2017. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life Aberdeen is reported to be Europe’s second biggest fund manager.[1]
Standard Life Aberdeen offers customers some socially responsible investment funds that exclude nuclear weapons producers[2] but most of its funds do not. The company owned or managed shares worth over £1.5 billion in 20 of the world’s top 28 nuclear weapons producers between January 2018 and January 2020:[3]
| Company | Amount (£ million*) |
| Airbus | 100.9 |
| BAE Systems | 371.4 |
| Boeing | 182.6 |
| Fluor | 1.5 |
| General Dynamics | 73.2 |
| Honeywell | 97.9 |
| Huntington Ingalls Industries | 7.6 |
| L3 Harris | 12.4 |
| Larsen and Toubro | 48.9 |
| Leidos | 14.0 |
| Leonardo | 11.3 |
| Lockheed Martin | 58.9 |
| Northrop Grumman | 28.5 |
| Raytheon | 180.8 |
| Rolls Royce | 221.0 |
| Safran | 16.0 |
| Serco | 6.6 |
| Textron | 5.6 |
| Thales | 33.2 |
| United Technologies Corp | 82.8 |
| Total | 1,555.1 |
* The GBP amounts in this column were converted from USD amounts using the exchange rate 1 USD = 0.762 GBP and are approximate due to rounding of the original USD amounts.
These investments are a mixture of share and bondholdings.
Action
Standard Life Aberdeen should stop investing in weapons of mass destruction. Please email Standard Life Aberdeen to request that the company adopts a policy that comprehensively excludes nuclear weapons producers from investment. You can use the template email at www.investinginchange.uk/action/standardlife/.
See also section 8 of this report which contains a step-by-step guide on how to engage with financial institutions.
NOTES
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/standard-life-aberdeen-asset-management-merger-deal-11-billion-a7892316.html.
[2] http://lib.standardlife.com/library/uk/invsria.pdf.
[3] S Snyder, Problematic Profiteering: Private company involvement in nuclear weapon production and their financial backers (PAX, 2021), forthcoming. For details of how each of these companies is involved with nuclear weapons, see S Snyder, Producing Mass Destruction – Private companies and the nuclear weapons industry (PAX-ICAN, 2019): https://www.dontbankonthebomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019_Producers-Report-FINAL.pdf.
Don't Bank on the Bomb Scotland 