They have 30 days to respond to letters before being placed on a financial blacklist
Six banks have been warned by the West Virginia State Treasury that they may be in violation of a new law preventing the state from doing business with financial institutions boycotting energy companies.
The office told The Epoch Times it had sent out letters on June 10, but did not share the banks’ names on the record.
Enacted in March 2022, S. 262 directs the state to notify financial institutions that they are slated for placement on the restricted financial institution list 45 days before the document is published.
Those institutions must respond within 30 days of receiving those notification letters to avoid winding up on the list.
In June 2021, Texas passed a similar law barring state agencies from investing in funds boycotting energy companies.
“We felt like we had a clear conflict of interest,” said West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore at a June 8 press conference.
He cited firms that he said wish to benefit from the state’s finances while simultaneously “trying to diminish our dollars and destroy our industries.”
The letters come after months of escalating conflict between many energy-producing states and much of the financial sector.
In May 2021, Moore and treasurers from 14 other states sent a letter to U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry protesting against his private comments to banks in March of that year. He reportedly asked major financial institutions to step up their climate commitments.
“We intend to put banks and financial institutions on notice of our position, as we urge them not to give in to pressure from the Biden administration to refuse to lend to or invest in coal, oil, and natural gas companies,” Moore and his colleagues wrote at the time.
Environmental nonprofits mounted their own pressure campaign encouraging Kerry to further Wall Street’s divestment from the fossil fuel industry.
A March 2021 letter from 145 environmental organizations demanded that Kerry “[end] the flow of private finance” to the fossil fuel industry, specifically requesting that he push asset managers “to divest from pure-play coal, oil, and gas.”
