Greenwashed Finance: Winners and Losers of the Sustainable Transition

Highly polluting extractive companies, fossil and mining are getting billions of euros from so-called 'green' funds according to the labels of the European Green Finance Regulation and unregulated “sustainability-linked bonds”, hijacking resources from truly sustainable companies.

As an important follow-up to the previous investigation, in this new project we show how these polluting companies keep receiving “sustainable” funding by running disinformation campaigns on the media. Then, both companies and asset managers investing in them claim to be engaging for the sustainable transition but so far, they have not been able to prove it. With this investigation we unveil the greenwashing leading this great deception in which the losers are responsible investors, communities affected by harmful activities, and the environment.

Key findings:

• Eni, Italian oil and gas giant, issued a “Sustainability-Linked” bond raising 2 billion euros through a massive disinformation campaign on italian major newspapers.
• 86% of the proceeds might be used for massive extractive activities, called carbon bombs, around the world.
• While promising to the public poor sustainability target, Eni is buying its CO2 reduction with low quality carbon credits, used to offset its emissions, resulting in an insignificant reduction of its operative emissions.
• Eni convinced the public to invest in this bond through a disinformation campaign in which claimed to be engaged in a just transition, and influencing articles that presented the bond as a planet saver “green” bond, which is not.  

Photo: Eni/InspiringPR