LearnTrade.ca -- Four of the biggest U.S. banks including JPMorgan are no longer signatories to the Equator Principles, an industry benchmark for assessing environmental and social risks in project-related finance, its website showed.
Set up and led by the banking industry, the principles help firms identify, assess and manage the potentially adverse impacts created by large infrastructure and industrial projects, and have been around since 2003.
The U.S. banks, which also include Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, all left the voluntary initiative this year, the Equator Principles website showed, without giving further details.
A spokesperson for the Equator Principles said the website was updated with the new information on Monday but declined to comment further, referring questions to the banks concerned, all of which did not immediately comment.
The move is the latest by some of the country's biggest financial services companies to leave group efforts connected to managing environmental or social risks, amid pressure from some Republican politicians that they could breach antitrust rules.
For Richard Brooks, climate finance director at nonprofit Stand.Earth, it was a "very troubling move by some of the biggest banks in the world to abandon a bare minimum set of standards which banks themselves have set".