Investment bankers know they are not immune to protests by shareholder activists who sometimes see Wall Street as an accomplice to social wrongs. But last week, when Roberto Perez, chief of the Uwa Indian nation of Colombia, paid an unannounced visit to the the San Francisco headquarters of the Sanford C. Bernstein investment firm, it seemed caught unprepared.
Mr. Perez delivered a letter demanding that Bernstein, a large shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, sell its stock as a gesture to help the 5,000-member Uwa nation in its eight-year struggle with Occidental over a jungle oil field. Occidental wants to drill in land the Uwa call sacred; it may contain 1.5 billion barrels of crude.
Drilling, which could begin within months, will “destroy the ancient culture of our ancestors,” Mr. Perez said in the letter to Sanford C. Bernstein’s chief operating officer, Roger Hertog, requesting that the firm divest its 53 million Occidental shares. Mr. Hertog and executives from Allied Capital, which recently acquired Bernstein, declined to comment.
Fidelity Investments sold more than $400 million of Occidental stock in September, after Mr. Perez visited its offices. Fidelity says that there was no connection.
