New York Says Exxon Misled Investors About Climate Risks
Source: US News/AP
5:03 PM. New York's attorney general sues Exxon Mobil, saying company misled investors about risks climate change posed to its business.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York's attorney general on Wednesday sued Exxon Mobil, saying the Texas energy giant has misled investors about the risks that climate change poses to its operations.
The lawsuit filed by Attorney General Barbara Underwood is the latest in a series of actions against the company claiming it has not been forthcoming with investors and the public about climate change.
The complaint states Exxon courted investors such as the state's public pension funds with inaccurate information, assuring them it was accounting for the possibility of stricter regulations of greenhouse gas emission in its planning, when it was doing much less than it claimed.
"Exxon built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations," Underwood said in a statement. - More...
Read more: https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2018-10-24/new-york-says-exxon-misled-investors-about-climate-risks
The lawsuit has been lauded by consumer and environmental groups as an important move to expose what they called Exxon Mobil's deception around climate change.
This "opens a new front in the climate change fight, with the prospect of a judicial reckoning and severe financial penalties for one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world," Blair Horner, executive director of New York Public Interest Research Group, said in a statement.
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Snips> Legal action claims the company hid the true extent of its financial risk to laws that would curb greenhouse gas emissions. New York is suing the oil giant ExxonMobil in a lawsuit that claims the company engaged in a “longstanding fraudulent scheme” to downplay the risks posed to its business by climate change regulations.
Exxon provided “false and misleading assurances” to shareholders that it had factored in climate regulations and that its vast reserves of oil and gas weren’t at major risk of being left as stranded assets, New York’s lawsuit claims.
Senior executives, including former chief executive Rex Tillerson, who was briefly US secretary of state in the Trump administration before being abruptly fired earlier this year, took part in this facade, the lawsuit states.
Rex Tillerson, fmr chief exec. of ExxonMobil, was named in a lawsuit against the company brought by NY's attny. general.
The suit, lodged in the New York supreme court, comes after three years of investigation into Exxon by attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts. Exxon’s role in covering up the impact of climate change has come to light in the recent years, with the company aware for decades about the consequences of burning fossil fuels only to downplay this in public. The company now says it accepts climate change is real and a threat, even pledging $1m toward a campaign to put a price on carbon.
The New York state lawsuit does not concern the impact of climate change, but rather Exxon’s role in communicating the risk of climate regulation to investors. Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan explained: “The overall message here is that Exxon and others that were really at the forefront of causing climate change conditions in our country and around the world long knew that this was taking place and withheld that information to the detriment of not just their investors but ultimately all of us around the country.”
More, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/24/lawsuit-alleges-exxonmobil-deceived-shareholders-on-climate-change-rules
Related, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/19/shell-and-exxons-secret-1980s-climate-change-warnings
