60 Minutes to feature Roger Robinson

This Sunday night at 7:00 pm, the country’s most prestigious and watched television news magazine, the CBS program 60 Minutes, will air a 15-minute segment that represents "must-viewing" for all Americans invested in the markets — and especially for those institutions that manage portfolios on their behalf. The segment, reported by Lesley Stahl, will feature a long-time Center for Security Policy associate and friend, Roger Robinson. In addition to other duties, Mr. Robinson heads Conflict Securities Advisory Group, Inc. (CSAG), a risk-assessment organization that created the database on which the segment is based.

As the 60 Minutes segment makes clear, CSAG’s research identifies the world’s publicly-traded companies with business interests in the following U.S.-government identified, terrorist-sponsoring states: Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The firm has rendered a particular service in profiling every public company that has been documented to be associated with the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

Together, the list illuminates a long-standing concern of the Center for Security Policy: Over 400 of the world’s largest companies have been doing business with such regimes yet they are embedded in the pension funds, mutual funds, 401(k) plans and other portfolios of virtually every American investor. In fact, institutional investors, such as state public pension systems, hold scores of these companies in portfolio, totaling billions of dollars in this key category of risk exposure — a category that Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson recently termed "a crucial issue for investors."

CSAG’s research has revealed — and 60 Minutes has now validated — that public companies are providing the bulk of the financial and technical life-support that has enabled these odious regimes to remain going concerns. What is more, these companies are providing the large-scale revenue streams and advanced, "dual-use" technology and equipment that enables these terrorist-sponsors to continue their support for terrorist organizations and to pursue multi-billion dollar weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

Although CSAG’s products simply provide information for investors focused on the financial risk to the share values and reputations of these firms, its work has nonetheless catalyzed the recent commitment by Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Donaldson to establish a new Office of Global Security Risk at the SEC. States like Arizona, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Florida are also reportedly at various stages — legislative or otherwise — of requiring greater disclosure and reporting of global security risk exposure.

The Center for Security Policy believes that all American investors have an obligation to ascertain whether companies in which they are invested are doing business in terrorist-sponsoring states or have been linked to the development and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. They should definitely not take the word of pension and mutual fund managers who tend to argue that this kind of risk-related "due diligence" is already being performed or, worse yet, is not material to their decisions.

60 Minutes is to be commended for publicizing the fact that individual American investors and participants in the Nation’s pension plans have a "need-to-know." Once they are able to determine which firms are partnering with rogue state governments, and to what end, they will be in a position to decide whether or not they will continue to hold these companies in portfolio. Clearly, in a time of war on international terrorism, "security-minded investing" is an essential part of protecting our nation’s security interests — and the value of individual portfolios.