ANZ Banking Group violated its own policies and international human rights standards by financing a Cambodian sugar company that seized land from local farmers, according to a statement released today by an Australian government body that monitors corporate behavior overseas. In a rare rebuke of a commercial bank, the Australian National Contact Point found it “difficult to reconcile” ANZ’s decision to finance Phnom Penh Sugar with the bank’s internal rules and the OECD Guidelines, an ethical business code that the…

Market Forces, working with Vietnamese community organisations and other international NGOs, has found that Equator Principles signatory banks are violating those principles in their involvement in syndicates funding five Vietnamese coal-fired power stations. In doing so, they are failing the people that the principles seek to protect. The six Equator banks cited by the new report are:  DZ Bank, HSBC, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Mizuho Financial Group (Mizuho), Standard Chartered and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking…

Today, on Indigenous People’s Day, Honor The Earth, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, 350 Seattle, Friends of the Earth France and others launched a campaign calling on JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and French bank Crédit Agricole to end their participation in credit lines of nearly $4 billion dollars associated with Indigenous rights violations with major tar sands pipeline companies Enbridge and TransCanada. The broad coalition of Indigenous and environmental groups kicked off the campaign by delivering an open letter to the…

Civil society groups from around the world today welcomed news that the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has taken significant steps to vastly reduce its exposure to coal through new financial intermediary (FI) investments. The CEO of the IFC, Philippe Le Houérou, has committed to help FI clients to reduce or in some cases exit coal.  He states in a blog post published today that the IFC has eliminated general purpose loans to financial intermediaries and now ‘ring-fences’…

Four days before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts forward its special report on 1.5°C, NGOs have released a new list of the world’s top 120 coal plant developers. “Building new coal plants is an assault on the Paris climate goals,” said Heffa Schücking, director of the German environment NGO Urgewald. “Our list names the top companies investors and banks need to shun if they are committed to limiting our planet’s temperature rise.”   While 2017 was another record-busting…

UK bank Standard Chartered’s announcement today that it “will not directly finance any new coal-fired power plant projects, including expansions, in any location” has been welcomed by BankTrack as a positive step towards bringing the bank's finance into line with the Paris Agreement goals. [1] The move makes Standard Chartered the seventeenth major international commercial bank to commit to end project finance for new coal power worldwide. [2] It also sees Standard Chartered go further in restricting climate-destructive coal…