BMO investment arm sold Microsoft shares over U.S. Army headset deal

BOSTON: A responsible-investment arm of Canada’s Bank of Montreal sold roughly $275 million worth of Microsoft Corp shares because of the company’s recent U.S. Army contract for augmented reality headsets, a bank spokesman said on Friday.

BMO’s responsible investment managers worried that the $22 billion Army contract Microsoft won in March moves the technology from a proof-of-concept phase to a battlefield-ready product outside its investment strategies’ mandate, BMO representatives said.

The contract “sits at odds with our central investment philosophy to avoid companies with damaging businesses practices, and we class bespoke military equipment as one component of our avoid criteria,” Jamie Jenkins, head of the Responsible Global Equities team at BMO, said in an e-mailed statement.