ActionAid Italia and ReCommon, given the information in their possession, can state that there is no involvement of UniCredit in the offshore gas extraction and liquefaction project in Mozambique called Coral North FLNG, also in light of the banking group’s policy on the oil and gas sector in relation to ultra-deepwater extraction activities.

The two organisations have been campaigning for months to denounce the socio-environmental impacts of gas extraction in Mozambique and to demand that Italian public and private financial institutions do not support new projects promoted by ENI. UniCredit is the Italian bank that mainly finances ENI’s activities, with a total of USD 7.7 billion since the Paris Agreement to date, of which USD 1.6 billion in 2023 alone.

This year, ActionAid and ReCommon promoted a pressure campaign on UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, sending over 600 letters in April asking for an explicit commitment by the bank not to finance Coral North FLNG. Currently, through an ActionAid petition, 5,000 people are asking all major Italian banks to stop investing in fossil fuel extraction projects.

"We are very happy that UniCredit will not be among the financiers of the Coral North FLNG project. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Intesa Sanpaolo, which has a less restrictive policy on deepwater extraction than UniCredit and has so far given no response to questions from civil society about its intentions to finance the Coral North FLNG project," stated Susanna De Guio of ReCommon.

The gas extraction projects in Mozambique’s northern province of Cabo Delgado have contributed to exacerbate a situation already deeply scarred by the ongoing conflict spearheaded by Islamist militias, which has so far claimed more than 4,000 lives and displaced around one million people.

On September 26^th, an investigation by the independent journalist Alex Perry, published in the European edition of the US media outlet Politico, helped to cast very dark shadows on the French fossil giant TotalEnergies, together with ENI the most active multinational in Mozambique. TotalEnergies, in fact, had all the elements to be aware of possible war crimes committed by the Mozambican army in defence of its Mozambique LNG project, in one of the most tragic events of the ongoing conflict in the north of the African country.

Originally posted on ReCommon's website here.