Delinquency of Duties
It turned out that the state-run National Pension Service (NPS) was indifferent to or neglected the corporate engagement as public pension fund in assailant companies of the humidifier sterilizer tragedy, including Oxy of Reckitt Benckiser.
The fact was confirmed by four agencies – Korea Sustainability Investing Forum, Korean Federation For Environmental Movement, Citizen's Center for Environment and Health and Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice – during the meeting on the ninth floor at the NPS headquarters in Gangnam, Seoul, on June 14 with Kang Myun-wook, chief investment officer of the NPS. They interviewed him about large investment made by the NPS in assailant companies of the humidifier sterilizer incident.
At the meeting, the NPS rejected to reveal the list of assailants and details of official engagement documents it sent to by reason that the engagement is usually in private. The company just said, “We asked the related companies to present plans to improve the safety verification and procedures and prevent the recurrence of the incident.”
The issue of the humidifier sterilizer deaths gained massive media attention in 2011. However, the NPS never had the corporate engagement until May this year. It finally sent the official request to assailants to submit improvement plans in order to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents on May 20 for the first time. It took so long for the company to take such action even after humidifier sterilizers caused the death of hundreds of people and thousands of victims.
Meanwhile, the NPS is now investing in more than 1.43 trillion won (US$1.22 billion) in direct and indirect assailant companies of the humidifier sterilizer incident, such as Reckitt Benckiser, the U.K-based headquarters of Oxy in, Tesco, the U.K.-based headquarters of Homeplus, Costco Wholesale Corporation, the headquarters of Costco Korea, AK Holdings, the holding company of Aekyung Industrial, Lotte Shopping, the parent company of Lotte Mart, E-mart, GS Retail and SK Chemical.