Franklin Templeton Could Feel Darfur's Heat

The last time we saw anything like this was the campaign to divest funds from South Africa back in the 1980s.

And once that got rolling, it didn't turn back.

Maybe divestment works, maybe it doesn't. What's clear, though, is that people eagerly embrace it. At least it lets them feel they are doing something about these horrendous atrocities. (More than 200,000 people have been slaughtered in Darfur.)

Meanwhile, mutual fund managers, more than most other businesspeople, hate being on the wrong end of bad publicity.

The Darfur divestment campaign is well financed, well organized, and pretty shrewd.

Organizers are targeting just a handful of companies that they say are most closely involved with the Sudanese government. Now that Rolls-Royce is pulling out, those companies are oil services giant Schlumberger SLB, China's PetroChina and Sinopec, Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas and India's ONGC.

Of these, oil-services giant Schlumberger is probably the most vulnerable. It is a Western company, with a massive $96 billion valuation, and its shares turn up in many mutual funds.

The activists aren't overplaying their hand. Allyn Brooks-LaSure, spokesman for the Save Darfur Coalition, told me on Friday that the campaign had followed the news from Fidelity by stepping up its pressure on other mutual fund companies -- behind closed doors, which is where they are mostly likely to get traction. "We have already begun to engage other companies privately," he says. A decision about whom to target with publicity next "may come within a matter of days."

Stay tuned.