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.…

Some of the world’s biggest banks are routinely hiding behind client confidentiality to conceal investments in companies and projects that infringe human and environmental rights, the first study of its kind reveals today. BankTrack, which campaigns to hold commercial banks accountable, today publishes analysis of five years of correspondence with 31 major international banks regarding problematic projects they finance. It finds that in nearly half of all responses (70 of 150), banks said they could not comment on whether they had a relationship…