OSLO (AFP) –
The Nobel Foundation said Friday its prizes will no longer be funded with investments from nuclear arms producers, just weeks after awarding the peace prize to a nuclear weapons disarmament campaign group.
The private institution, based in Stockholm, is responsible for managing the fund left by the prizes’ founder, Alfred Nobel, a Swedish scientist who invented dynamite.
The cash award given to Nobel laureates comes from this fund, which according to Norwegian environmental organisation Framtiden i Vaare Hender (The Future in Our Hands) is financed with investments in funds from companies that manufacture nuclear weapons.
This means that part of the cash award — which this year was SEK nine million ($1.1 million; 925,000 euros) per category — came from companies such as “Airbus, Boeing, Safran and Northrop Grumman Corp,” so it is “very likely that the Nobel Foundation is invested in companies involved in (the) production of nuclear weapons,” Framtiden said.
The discovery was made all the more embarrassing because the Nobel peace prize on October 6 was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
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“At the latest, by March next year we will have no investment in anything that is connected with any kind of production which is classified as connected with nuclear weapons”.
Confronted with the revelations on Thursday, the head of the Nobel Institute Olav Njolstad admitted on Norwegian radio that it “doesn’t look good”.
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