Swiss Banks Fund Rainforest Destruction In SE Asia

07 July 2009

MEDIA RELEASE, BRUNO MANSER FUND (BMF), BASEL / SWITZERLAND

Swiss Banks Continue To Fund Rainforest Destruction In South-East Asia

Swiss banks Credit Suisse and UBS, together with the French BNP Paribas, are helping Indonesian palm oil group to raise up to 280 million Swiss Franks (258 million USD)

Swiss NGO Berne Declaration (www.evb.ch) has made public that the Swiss banks Credit Suisse and UBS, together with the French BNP Parisbas group, are assisting one of Indonesia's largest palm oil companies to raise up to 280 million Swiss Franks (258 million USD) of new capital. Shareholders of the Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources Ltd, the holding company of the Indonesian Sinar Mas Group's palm oil activities, are invited to purchase new shares and options in order to allow the group to expand its operations.

A recent Greenpeace Indonesia report states that Sinar Mas has plans to massively expand its plantations in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Papua, where it plans to "develop" a rainforest area of up to 2.8 million hectares. "The vast majority of future expansion is likely to involve deforestation, some on peatlands and in the habitats of the critically endangered orang-utan", Greenpeace said.

In March 2007, Credit Suisse has already come under fire over its leading role in the Hong Kong stock exchange listing of Samling Global, the Malaysian timber group. Samling is responsible for the ongoing destruction of indigenous communities' lands in the rainforests of Borneo. Despite assurances that the bank had carefully examined the timber group's operations, only months after the listing Samling was fined for large-scale illegal logging in Guyana.

The Bruno Manser Fund condemns the three European banks' funding of the expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia and calls on Credit Suisse, UBS and BNP Paribas to stop this kind of short-sighted dealings. Despite calls for transparency, Credit Suisse and UBS refuse to publish their funding policies for forest-related commercial operations. In December 2008, Credit Suisse informed the Bruno Manser Fund on the existence of a new Global Forestry Policy but bank officials refused to make the bank's guidelines publicly available.

ENDS

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