Where your billz at

Students want to know if Dal has Sudan investments
But university has spurned their bid to get list of its holdings
By CHRIS LAMBIE Staff Reporter h
Fri. Mar 6 - 5:48 AM

A student group at Dalhousie University is trying to figure out whether the Halifax school has investments in Sudan.

Up to 300,000 people have died in the state-sponsored genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, and 2.7 million have fled their homes.

"One of our campaigns is called the divestment campaign where, basically, students at various universities work to investigate the investment holdings of the university and then compare that to a list of companies . . . that are known to either work in Sudan, have conglomerates in Sudan or are somehow financially supporting the government of Sudan," said Tara MacDougall of Students Taking Action Now Darfur, which has campus groups across North America.

"And then we’ll work to remove those investment holdings from the university, thereby cutting off the funds of the government of Sudan."

But Dalhousie refused to just hand over details about its investment portfolio. Instead, the university insisted the student group apply for the data through provincial freedom of information laws.

"They’ve basically been giving us the runaround," Ms. MacDougall said. "They’ve finally come to the stage where they’ve told us we need to pay $300 to access about a 12-page document, which tells us the investments of the university."

The student group’s director, Kate Varsava, wrote to Dalhousie president Tom Traves and three other university administrators last month, saying its members had been trying for more than a year to get their hands on the university’s list of investments.

"I was wondering if I could arrange a meeting with any of you to discuss divestment and any possible methods of obtaining a list of Dalhousie’s investments, so that we can move forward with this initiative which we believe is imperative and will be effective in bringing an end to the atrocities being suffered in Sudan," Ms. Varsava wrote.

The email response from the president’s office turned them down flat.

"Dalhousie University has a fiduciary responsibility to its employees for whom we invest their pension funds to optimize our investments for their ultimate disposal," says the email.

Dal uses about a dozen specialist investment firms, it says.

"We do not direct their individual and changing investment decisions. Nor do we have detailed information about where the firms in which we may have a momentary investment carry out all aspects of their business," the email says.

"We cannot provide a list of individual investments without a large amount of work, and so if someone wants access to specific information of the sort you mention we would require you to file a (freedom of information) request, and if it is legal to respond we would require you to pay for the substantial staff time that would be required to compile the information since university staff would have to be pulled off their regular jobs to do so.

"Of course, the information provided would only be a snapshot of the information collected at that moment and could well have changed by the time it was forwarded if the investment managers wished to sell the investment and purchase something else in the meanwhile."

The student group, on principle, doesn’t want to pay the $300, which would be very tough on its yearly budget.

"We will pay the $300 if that’s what it comes down to; we do believe it’s important," said Ms. MacDougall, a third-year international development student.

But right now the group is trying to "embarrass the university into paying it for us," she said.

A Dalhousie spokesman contacted with questions about the issue did not return calls by deadline.

Members don’t know whether Dal has investments in the vast oil-rich country south of Egypt. But they are determined to find out.

"We think this is something that’s important and that the Dal community cares about," Ms. MacDougall said. "Maybe there are no investments indirectly contributing to genocide, but it’s the fact that the university seems to think it’s not important and isn’t being very transparent with us."