North Dakota tax dollars are financing Putin’s regime in Russia
Minot, N.D. — It’s not news that North Dakota’s Legacy Fund, made up of revenues from taxes on the state’s oil and gas industry, is invested in some unseemly ways.
I detailed those investments in places like China and Russia in a column way back in 2020 .
But in the context of the Russian regime’s bloody aggression in Ukraine, at least some of those investments are looking downright alarming.
This isn’t a question of North Dakota’s dollars merely being invested in companies based in Russia. The Legacy Fund is invested in the Russian state that is, at this moment, using tanks and bombs and airstrikes in an expansionist war aimed at Ukraine, which is part of a more extensive campaign to reconstitute some modern iteration of the Soviet Union.
According to a spreadsheet of Legacy Fund positions as of June 30, 2021, the money managers who make the fund’s investment had put $1.5 million into investments in the Russian Federation.
