It’s not likely that any of Pennsylvania’s public school teachers paid attention to it, but a brief announcement in early 2018 held some unwelcome news for their retirement savings.

Public pension funds have a reputation for being conservative investors. Yet, on March 19, 2018, a terse corporate notice alerted the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System to the fact that its latest investment was anything but bland. “We hereby inform you,” the notice began, “that as a result of the independence referendum held by Kurdistan Regional Government on 25th September 2017, KRG’s exports have decreased by almost 50% due to the takeover of Kirkuk oilfields.”

relates to U.S. Teachers’ Pensions Helped Fund War Over Oil in Iraq
Excerpted from The World for Sale, to be published by Random House Business in the U.K. on Feb. 25 and Oxford University Press in the U.S. on March 1.SOURCE: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
A sliver of the teachers’ retirement savings had been directed to one of the most febrile regions of the Middle East. They weren’t alone. In South Carolina, the savings of over 600,000 police officers, judges, and other public sector workers had been funneled into the same investment. So had the savings of the teachers, firefighters, and police officers of West Virginia.

If the pensioners had looked at the annual reports of their funds, they probably wouldn’t have been any the wiser. Buried in the list of investments held by their funds, they would have seen the name “Oilflow SPV 1 DAC.” Digging a little deeper, they would have found that Oilflow SPV 1 DAC was an Irish company whose address was a nondescript, four-story building in central Dublin where some 200 other companies were also formally incorporated.

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