[Retracted] Vermont Teachers' Pension Is Invested in the Company That Just Eliminated Vermont's Pulpwood Market

This piece originally connected Vermont’s pension fund (VPIC) to Atlas Holdings, the company that owns Finch Paper, through a Blue Owl Capital investment. Further reporting showed that connection wasn’t accurate.

VPIC’s money is in a Blue Owl real estate fund. The Blue Owl fund that invested in Atlas Holdings is a separate fund, with separate investors. VPIC has no financial stake in Atlas, and no financial connection to the Finch Paper mill closure.

What’s still true: VPIC and Atlas Holdings both use Blue Owl Capital as an asset manager, through two unrelated funds. That’s a narrower and less significant fact than this piece originally claimed, and it doesn’t support the piece’s original framing or headline.

One consequence of this correction is worth stating plainly: VPIC’s retirement funds are not tied to the pulp market disruption this piece described. Vermont teachers, state employees, and municipal workers covered by VPIC have no financial exposure to the Finch Paper closure through this fund.

Every individual fact in this piece was independently sourced and verified — VPIC’s investments, Blue Owl’s structure, Atlas’s stake, Finch’s ownership. The error was in how those facts were connected: the piece described a capital relationship between VPIC and Atlas that the sources didn’t actually establish. That’s a narrative error, not a sourcing one, and it’s on me either way.

This surfaced during continued reporting for a later piece in this series, while re-verifying the same financial relationships in more detail. The same process that produces this series is the process that caught it.

Rather than run a correction on a piece whose core premise didn’t hold up, this piece has been retracted.

— Alexsys Thompson, July 29, 2026