Insurance

Aegon

Last edited by lenazun on November 25, 2009 - 8:59pm
Company Snapshot: 

Aegon N.V., headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands, is one of the world's largest life insurance and pension companies, and has additional business in savings and investment products; accident, supplemental health, and general insurance; and some limited banking activities. These operations are conducted by subsidiaries of Aegon N.V., which is itself a holding company. The subsidiary Transamerica, as well as its parent company Aegon, came under attack in 2009 withholding the pension benefits of 60,000 fnv havenpensioenkrant en.pdf Dutch dock workers. Aegon also received criticism for seeking financial assistance under the U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) after already having been bailed out by the Netherlands. Aegon later withdrew its TARP application.

Ownership status: 
Publicly traded
Chief executive officer: 
Alex Wynaendts
Website: 
Aegon. Local Knowledge. Global Power.
Tel: 
+31 703448344
Fax: 
+31 703448445
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Corporate accountability
Labor: 

In March 2007, Aegon purchased Optas, a Dutch life insurance firm. The purchase included Optas's pension assets for some 60,000 Dutch dock workers. Aegon's refusal, as of January 2009, to pay out these benefits led unions to target the company. The dockers industry -- dock employers and the union -- assert that in its 2007 annual accounts, Aegon "unjustly" earmarked as company assets 1.7 billion euros that actually belonged to the pension funds. fnv havenpensioenkrant en.pdf (Vasco van der Boom & Rob van't Wel, November 2008).

Aegon claimed that the assets backed the company's insurance obligations, and asserted that port employers and dock workers have no special rights to the funds. Aegon refused to talk with the dockers industry.

Human rights: 

In 2008 the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) in Amsterdam conducted an overview of Aegon's controversial business practices. It found that Aegon Asset Management -- a UK-based fully owned subsidiary of Aegon that managed 42 billion pounds of assets in the UK -- offers private investors three different ethical investment funds. Aegon screens them to exclude companies that 1) operate in countries with poor human rights records, and 2) lack established management policies on human rights issues.

However, research by SOMO revealed that one of the Ethical Equity Fund's top holdings, Tullow Oil, fulfilled neither of those criteria. As of 2009 it was the fund's fourth biggest holding at 2.9% of the total. Tullow Oil is one of Europe's largest independent oil and gas exploration and production companies, with 90 licenses in 22 countries including in Africa, Europe, South Asia, and South America.

Aegon relies on EIRIS assessments of countries' human rights records. The Ethical Investment Research Service rate countries on A and B lists, both indicating a serious risk of human rights violations. Violations in list A countries are particularly prevalent. Tullow Oil is active in several of the countries in list A including Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Uganda, and Bangladesh. List B countries where Aegon does business include Congo (Brazzaville), Liberia, and Mauritania.

SOMO's studies of Equatorial Guinea and Democratic Republic of the Congo can be read from the pdf link found here. Equatorial Guinea is internationally considered one of the world's most tightly closed and repressive regimes. Various human rights organizations have placed its leader, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, among Africa's worst abusers of human rights. In the DRC, Tullow Oil is working closely with government officials in the east of the country where the human rights record is especially poor, with mass killings, rape, and torture occurring daily. The conflict and humanitarian crisis in the DRC have claimed the lives of 5.4 million people since 1998.