While the State Investment Board continues to unwind its investments in Russia, KX News is taking a closer look at the investments of our tax dollars with a country that is providing economic aid to Russia: China.

We recently filed another open records request for a list of our foreign investments for our Legacy Fund, our pension funds and the insurance fund.

We spoke to Fargo attorney Luke Heck who was among the first to uncover many of the controversial foreign investments the SIB was making with our tax dollars back in 2020.

Heck was responsible for obtaining and shining a spotlight on Legacy Fund foreign investments for the fiscal year 2019-20.​

We asked Heck to review the documents. One Chinese investment, in particular, caught his attention.

“When I saw Bilibili at first glance I read some of the articles collaterally talking about inappropriate filming of people in their private sexualized filming of that, illusions at a minimum to some children in inappropriate sexual conduct in that regard and it’s like why are we invested in this?” he said.

The SIB has invested our tax dollars in the Chinese company Bilibili Inc. This online entertainment company has been under criticism for allowing pedophilic content on its website.

These criticisms include the company streaming an anime video of a 34-year-old man purportedly molesting a 9-year-old girl, and video streaming a gynecological surgery on a woman who was unaware of the procedure being filmed and live-streamed on the company’s site.

“It’s a pretty dangerous game to be playing with those kinds of allegations that are being lodged against Bilibili for their conduct with pedophilic stuff and surreptitious intrusion,” said Heck.

Tens of thousands of women have boycotted the service for what they say is “out of control misogyny.”

“The State Investment Board needs to either on their own or assign a group of individuals to review the financials of our investment portfolios independently so they can see what the circumstance is at that point and be able to make their own individual assessment. Not the assessment of money managers, not the assessment of anyone else. Make an independent assessment. We can think for ourselves,” Heck added.

We are reaching out to the SIB for more information about Bilibili and why our tax dollars are being invested in this company.

We understand this investment was made by the SIB sometime within the last nine months.

The SIB has yet to announce what it plans to do with our investments in China following its support for Russia in the war in Ukraine.

The SIB meets again on April 22.