ING, the Netherlands’ biggest bank, is facing the threat of legal action over its financing of fossil fuel companies and its “contribution” to climate change by the campaign group that won a landmark case against Shell in a Dutch court.
In what could become a test case for the banking industry, Friends of the Earth Netherlands sent a legal liability notice to ING boss Steven van Rijswijk on Friday, claiming the bank had breached its legal obligations “by contributing to dangerous climate change”.
Here’s a gift link to the original article so that people can access it directly instead of depending on an archive site which blocks people whose DNS doesn’t leak their approximate location. (I’ll note that some Financial Times gift links cap the number of people who can use them, so this may stop working after a while)
I’ll note that ING has a pretty awful policy of continuing fossil fuel expansion until 2040:
Under the new approach, ING said it would phase out direct project finance for upstream oil and gas deals by 2040 and would triple its financing of renewables by 2025. This does not prevent it from providing lending or underwriting services to energy groups that are expanding fossil fuel production.
