A new BankTrack briefing raises serious questions about how banks are conducting human rights due diligence and their ability to recognise and act upon the impacts of their finance. For the publication, “Banks and Dirty Diesel” [PDF], BankTrack contacted 26 banks that have loaned billions to the oil traders Trafigura and Vitol, to request details of how they have fulfilled their human rights obligations in light of a detailed investigation by Swiss NGO Public Eye into how the traders are flooding Africa with toxic fuels. Banks…

This morning Native American defenders and Friends of the Earth and ANV-COP21 activists built a pipeline inside a branch of Société Générale on Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris. The action took place to denounce support from French banks for the construction of new transportation infrastructures for unconventional fossil fuels in the United States.  The campaigners will attend the annual general meetings of BNP Paribas and Société Générale tomorrow, and of Crédit Agricole on…

This analysis examines the banks that are in line to finance the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 301-mile, $3.5 billion fracked-gas project proposed to run from West Virginia through south central Virginia. EQT Midstream Partners (EQM) is the driving force behind the project and EQM’s financing reveals the clearest links to the banks that will fund the pipeline. Eighteen banks are invested in EQM’s two key current financing sources. Six U.S. ‘main street’ banks – banks that are leading providers of personal banking…

At Deutsche Bank’s annual general meeting on May 18, representatives of German, Dominican and international civil society will urge the bank to stop its financing for the Punta Catalina coal power plant, amid allegations of corruption surrounding the project.   In the Caribbean state of Dominican Republic, Deutsche Bank is heading a financial consortium featuring four other top European banks which have already disbursed more than half of an agreed $632.5 million loan, signed in 2015, for two new coal-fired power plants in the city of…

Oxfam Novib, Greenpeace, BankTrack and Friends of the Earth Netherlands have this week filed a complaint against ING, the largest bank in the Netherlands, at the Dutch National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines (NCP). The organisations claim that ING violates the OECD guidelines on the environment and climate change. The bank continues to lend billions to fossil fuel companies, with no plans to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from its finance. The four organisations called on ING Executive Chairman Ralph Hamers to make a concrete…

Today, a coalition of grassroots Indigenous groups from across Turtle Island joins the 121 First Nations and Tribes united by the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion, to launch a new, integrated divestment campaign against the banks funding Dakota Access and the four tar sands crude oil pipelines currently proposed out of Canada.    “We call on all banks and financial institutions to withdraw their investments in the corporations proposing to build new pipelines to carry even more tar sands oil out of Canada,”…