Today interventions inside and outside the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of ING, a Dutch multinational banking corporation, raised the pressure on shareholders to end the bank’s practice of financing fossil fuel and demanded that it pulls out of projects like the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). TAP is the €5 billion western extension of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), a carbon bomb that will transport an initial 10 billion cubic metres of fossil gas per year from the Caspian Sea to Europe. ING shareholder Serena Fiorentino, also a member…

The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises demand that Dutch bank ING formulates concrete climate goals for its financial services, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement, concludes the Dutch National Contact Point for OECD Guidelines in its final statement following a complaint lodged against ING in May 2017 by Oxfam Novib, Greenpeace NL, BankTrack and Friends of the Earth Netherlands (Milieudefensie). Peter Ras, senior policy advisor at Oxfam Novib: “We are happy about this well-considered decision by the National Contact Point,…

Today at Banco Santander’s annual shareholders’ meeting environmental campaigners from across Europe challenged the bank’s board of directors to take action to cut the institution’s multi-billion dollar support for the fossil fuel industry. Outside the AGM, in Santander, Spain, campaigners from Ecologistas en Acción hung large banners from a sailing boat with the combined messages aimed at Spain’s biggest bank of ‘Fossil Banks, No Thanks!’ and ‘By 2020 We Rise Up’. Inside the AGM, Polish…

Re:Common on the occasion of today's shareholders' meeting of Unicredit launches its latest report "An Ash Country - the Italian responsibilities in the devastating coal race in Turkey". Unicredit is the foreign bank most involved in the Turkish coal business. In 2014, the most important Italian credit institution through its Turkish subsidiary Yapi Kredi and its partner Koc Financial Services granted two loans of 417 million dollars each to the Turkish companies Limak and IC Ictas. The loans were for the acquisition of the newly…

In reaction to UBS updating its coal exclusion policy last week, Katya Nikitenko, Greenpeace Finance Campaign Lead, said: “If this were 2008, such an announcement would have earned UBS a lot of plaudits. Unfortunately, in 2019, we are ten years away from being swept away by irreversible climate change, and we all need to take brave and big steps to decarbonise the world. “UBS has provided close to USD 25 billion in funding to fossil fuels over the 3 years since the Paris Agreement was signed. Most of it is going via corporate lending.…