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As Muammar el-Qaddafi wages war on his own people, the US is imposing unilateral sanctions, including the blocking of billion in Libyan government assets as per President Obama’s executive order late last Friday night. It’s the largest amount of money ever seized in a government sanction. European governments are also imposing sanctions against funds controlled by the Libyan regime.

But the UK move to freeze Libya’s sovereign assets has, as the UK Guardian reports, caused Pearson, the publishing company that owns the Financial Times as well as book publisher Penguin, to solicit legal advice. As it turns out, Libya is Pearson’s fifth largest shareholder.

According to the Guardian:

Pearson has begun a legal process to ascertain if the stake held by the Libyan Investment Authority, the fifth biggest shareholder in the Financial Times owner with a £250m investment, needs to be frozen following a government order.

On Sunday the UK government moved to freeze the assets of Muammar Gaddafi and five members of his family, a decision that has prompted Pearson’s lawyers to file legal documents to determine exactly who is the beneficial owner of the stake.

Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson, told the Guardian, “It is abhorrent to us what is happening in Libya and we have made it clear we are uncomfortable with the holding. We are in a terrible position, it is abhorrent for everyone at Pearson. We do not know what the freeze notice covers at this point.”

Last year, Libya’s sovereign wealth fund increased its stake in Pearson to over 3%.

“We did meet with one of their financial representatives, a European — he was a middleman, not really a representative of the authority,” Scardino told the Guardian. “We are a public company in a free market and we don’t choose our shareholders they choose us. The basic premise is, this is one of those glitches in the free market system. Unfortunately we can’t tell a shareholder to get off our register.”

The Guardian also notes that:

The company said that the protests in the Middle East had not had a massive impact on Pearson’s international education business. The division made £1.2bn in revenues last year with the Middle East accounting for about 5%, some £62m. Pearson’s main markets in the region are Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.