World Development Movement takes legal action against UK Treasury for spending money on high-carbon projects

30 June 2009

The World Development Movement has taken legal action to challenge the UK Treasury’s decision to finance bank RBS while overlooking environment and human rights criteria to check that taxpayers’ money is spent in a meaningful way.

The World Development Movement, along with Platform and People and Planet, has criticised the government’s approach in ploughing taxpayers’ money into what they refer to as an ‘oil and gas’ bank.

Action was launched following a letter written by Platform to the Treasury asking why money had been used to rescue a bank known for financing high carbon projects. The response was reported to have been: ‘environmental and human rights records of individual banks were of no relevance.’

The World Development Movement has expressed outrage at the financing RBS received despite the £10bn it has spent in loans to coal, oil and gas companies since last October.

‘Apart from the public interest question, the government is supposed to spend public money in a way that reinforces its policies and legislation. So how can this expenditure be justified given that the government and especially Gordon Brown goes to considerable lengths to proclaim, insist and reiterate that the UK is a world leader on tackling climate change, global poverty and human rights abuses? The Treasury’s decision to pour money into RBS and the other bailed out banks renders these words meaningless,’ a company statement said.

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Tags: energy efficiency

This story was published on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Europe, companies, energy efficiency. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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