New data obtained by KCL UCU shows that our university’s investment in companies implicated in human rights abuses and violations of international law is getting worse. For example, between 2024 (Q2) and 2025 (Q3) there was a 17% increase in the value of KCL’s endowment invested in companies named by the UN as doing business in illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. In the same period, KCL’s investment in military-surveillance-tech company Palantir almost quadrupled. This comes after the rejection of our formal submission to KCL Council’s Finance Committee last year to reform the university’s Ethical Investments Policy in order to prevent investment of KCL’s endowment in companies that support genocide, particularly in Palestine. This also comes after the formal trade dispute that KCL UCU has opened with management, which includes a demand for divestment. This is also happening alongside increased repression of protest on campus, including the shameful indefinite suspension of our student Usama Ghanem, whose visa has now been revoked.
Currently, approximately £220 million of KCL’s endowment fund is invested through multiple funds into around 1700 companies. Data on the specific companies invested in by these funds is not made publicly available on the KCL website. However, we have obtained from management several of these lists, updated since 2023. The latest data we have seen is from October 2025. This shows increases in endowment investment in several types of companies that our members believe need to be challenged.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has a list of companies that operate in Israeli settlements (which the ICJ’s advisory ruling of July 2024 states have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law). Major expansions of these settlements are continuing. Updated in 2023, the UNHCR list contains 97 international and Israeli companies. As of 2024 (Q2), King’s College London’s endowment was invested (through fund managers) in 9 of these companies, to a total of £295,704. The companies are: AirBnb, Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Booking.com, Expedia, Israel Discount Bank, Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, Motorola and Alstom. This was part of the data that KCL UCU presented to the Finance Committee in June 2025, where divestment from the companies was proposed and rejected. After our representation to Council, subsequent data (from October 2025) shows that the total amount of this investment has increased to £345,794 – a 17% increase.
In 2024, KCL’s Ethical Investments Policy was amended to prevent direct or indirect investment “in companies deemed to be engaged in controversial weapons” (e.g. white phosphorous, depleted uranium, landmines etc). However, Israeli attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza have not primarily involved the use of ‘controversial weapons’, relying instead on ‘conventional’ munitions. The current KCL Ethical Investment Policy does not prohibit KCL from investing its endowment into companies that supply conventional weapons to states implicated in war crimes or human rights abuses.
Beyond this, data analytics, artificial intelligence and drones for surveillance and targeting have been central to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as targets for assassination, using AI targeting systems with little human oversight and an extremely permissive policy for civilian casualties. Data mining and surveillance technology companies such Palantir are key providers of AI technology to the Israeli military and have expressed public support for Israel on numerous occasions. When we presented this data to Council, we knew that KCL had a £42,243 investment in Palantir. As of October 2025 this had almost quadrupled to £159,596. Genocide is clearly good for business for companies like Palantir. And as its share price rises, this is reflected in increases in investment by the type of funds that KCL’s endowment uses. Beyond these examples, earlier research conducted by the KCL BDS Forum estimated a total of around £20 million in investments of the KCL endowment into a wider range of complicit companies. The recent data discussed here shows that these trends are increasing.
In the broader context of the genocide, specific endowment investments in individual companies may sometimes seem small. But if global corporations (like Maersk) can make decisions to divest/delink from companies such as those on the settlements ‘blacklist’, then why can’t a university like KCL, whose public mission is to ‘make the world a better place’?
KCL management says that beyond the ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ criteria applied by each of the investment funds (excluding fossil fuels, tobacco, ‘controversial weapons’ etc), there’s no mechanism to screen out investment in companies on the UN settlement blacklist, or companies like Palantir. This means that the wider KCL community has no way of meaningfully influencing where/how the endowment is invested. As KCL UCU, we can’t accept this.
Our branch balloted on our formal dispute in October/November 2025 and over 70% of voting members said they were willing to take strike action on this and other issues relating to governance at KCL. We missed the turnout threshold by 1% and the branch is currently building a wider campaign towards a reballot to give us a mandate for collective action for the next academic year. We will likely need the leverage of industrial action to push management to reforming the endowment investment model. This would have to include the addition of further investment exclusions (e.g. on human rights and international law grounds). To make such exclusions enforceable there would also likely need to be a move towards direct investment through a single fund manager, over which mechanisms could be created for staff input into decisions about the ethical use of the endowment.
Thursday 12 February is the National Workplace Day of Action for Palestine and we will be joining students and UNISON in a walkout and rally outside the Strand campus at 12pm. To discuss and plan our campaigning on these issues, this will be immediately followed by a townhall meeting at 1.30pm in Waterloo JCMB 105 (and online). Come along to participate in planning how we can take collective action for meaningful worker engagement in how our university is run!