“Exclusive: European banks face indigenous calls to end Amazon oil trade” – 11 August 2020

…European banks committed to backing action on climate change face allegations of double standards from indigenous groups in Ecuador after a report named them as major players in the trade in oil from the Amazon rainforest. Stand.earth and Amazon Watch said ING, Credit Suisse, Natixis, BNP Paribas, UBS and Rabobank were the largest backers in the shipment of about $10 billion of dollars of Ecuadorian crude to U.S. refineries over the last decade…Indigenous communities resisting oil industry plans to push deeper into their territories said any bank backing the trade from the Amazon was complicit in growing threats to the world’s largest rainforest…Rabobank, of the Netherlands, said in a statement it had stopped financing Ecuadorian crude cargoes earlier this year, adding that the concerns raised were “in line with our policy commitments and part of the due diligence in our trade finance operations”. Both France’s Natixis and Dutch bank ING pledged to look into the concerns raised in the report. Swiss bank UBS said it already had declined some crude oil transactions from the region due to concerns about indigenous land rights. Credit Suisse said the issues raised did not represent any breach of any of its oil and gas lending policies and it regularly reviewed its policies on environmental and social risks. French bank BNP Paribas said the report’s methodology was “opaque” and questioned how the authors had arrived at estimates of banks’ financial exposures. The report also said Deutsche Bank had played a smaller role, including financing a cargo of crude from Ecuador in April. The bank, which last month said it was tightening its policies for fossil fuel lending, declined to comment…Natixis said it understood that financing oil exports might encourage the planned expansion in the Yasuni National Park... Although ING questioned the calculations of its exposure and said that two oil traders named in the report were no longer clients, it also said it was discussing ways to improve its scrutiny of Amazon-linked transactions… UBS told Reuters it had declined to back some transactions when the origin of the oil was “verifiably” in breach of its standards, including those to protect indigenous land rights and U.N. heritage sites and was “committed to maintaining the highest environmental and social standards”… BNP Paribas said Amazon Watch and Stand.earth had not given it the kind of opportunity to engage during the preparation of the report that it was used to… Moira Birss of Amazon Watch said BNP Paribas was given a draft of the report more than two weeks ahead of publication and could have asked for more details…