STOP PRESS  October 11 - ACCION ECOLOGICA and grassroots groups blockade OCP pipeline at Mindo incl pictures

Friends, we are asking you to send an email to try and stop this German
bank from financing the OCP pipeling in Ecuador. It was sent to us by our
friends at Rettet den Regenwald. We have added a bit of a warning  at the
end in the form of the article from "The American Banker". You may wish to
include this in your email  or not.

The bank will probably make a final decision about the financing of the OCP
the first days of August.

For more on this issue go to www.amazonwatch.org

Please delete  our signatures, add your own and cut and paste the message to
the 4 email addresses below,

for the Earth

John Seed

Rettet den Regenwald e. V.
Friedhofsweg 28
22337 Hamburg
Tel. 040 - 4103804
Fax: 040 - 4500144
info@regenwald.ORG
www.regenwald.ORG







presse@westlb.de
wolfgang.clement@landtag.nrw.de
poststelle@mwmev.nrw.de
info@rsgv.de


Dear Sirs,

It is with great concern we  learn that WestLB is leading a consortium
of banks that is planning to finance the construction of the new Heavy
Oil Pipeline (Oloedocto de Crudos Pesados   OCP) throughout Ecuador, by
means of a $900 million loan.

The OCP is designed to transport up to 450,00 barrels daily of heavy oil
that will be extracted from protected areas and indigenous territories
in virgin tropical rainforest in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This activity
could potentially cause the disappearance of ethnic minorities such as
the Huaorani and Zapara peoples.

This pipeline will cut through eleven protected areas of the utmost
ecological importance. The construction of
the OCP will have catastrophic ecological, social, and economic
consequences for more than a million Ecuadorians, destroying their way
of life. This constitutes a violation of the fundamental and
environmental rights of the affected peoples. Through this loan, WestLB
would  be
playing a part in these violations.

The OCP will share a large part of its trajectory with the already
existing pipeline, the SOTE, whose ruptures have caused 67 deaths, and
have left dozens wounded and missing. Furthermore, the oil spilled in
more than 47 accidents has caused incalculable ecological damage.

Precisely because it is the largest public bank in Germany, WestLB has a
particular responsibility to respect human rights throughout the world
and to care for the environment.

We urge WestLB to immediately abandon plans to finance the OCP project
in Ecuador, and we hope you will exercise your significant political
responsibility to do the same.

The days when financial institutions could finance the destruction of nature
with impunity are drawing to a close. Please see the appended article from
The American Banker: "Pay Attention to Activists Or Pay in Money and Grief".

The tropical rainforests are the womb of life. They are home to more than
half the species of plants and animals in the world. If you underwrite their
destruction you will certainly live to regret it.

We respectfully await your prompt response,

John Seed, Ruth Rosenhek, Binnie O'Dwyer, Elke Nicholson, Phil Murray

The American Banker
Pay Attention to Activists Or Pay in Money and Grief
June 15, 2001
By Ricardo Bayon

Financial institutions have escaped the wrath of nonprofit environmental
organizations for many years, but they'd better be careful. Unlike their
colleagues in the oil business, financiers have rarely faced the threat of
boycotts and activist protests. However, the situation is changing rapidly,
and it could cost them billions of dollars and much bad publicity.

In the 1990s activist groups became increasingly interested in the work of
the multilateral financial institutions -- publicly financed banks and
organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and
the World Trade Organization. As a result they began learning about global
financial flows, banking, lending, underwriting, and their impact on
development.

Years of campaigns finally came to a head during the huge protests in
Seattle and the nation's capital last year that made the front pages of
major newspapers around the world. What has not been front-page news,
however, is that a similar process is now under way, and this time the
activists are targeting private financial institutions.

In many ways this was to be expected as the logical extension of campaigns
against the World Bank or the WTO. Sooner or later activists were bound to
realize that most of the money flowing to developing countries comes not
from multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, but from the private
financial sector.

The numbers could not be clearer: According to the World Bank and the IMF,
before 1990, 80% of the money flowing to developing countries was coming
from governments, while 20% came from the private sector. After 1991,
however, government money began to dry up and private financing grew at an
astonishing rate. By last year those numbers had been reversed. Now 80% of
the money flowing into developing countries comes from the private sector,
the rest from government sources. The implications of this shift have not
been lost on the activist groups.

To deal with the fact that the projects they cared about were being financed
by the private sector, and not the World Bank, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs) began learning more about the way money was moved and projects were
financed. They produced training sessions on finance, published booklets on
project finance, and organized campaigns targeting major banks.

All of this has culminated in major initiatives aimed at global institutions
including Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Coincidentally, two of
these relate to projects in China.

The first campaign stemmed from environmental and social concerns
surrounding the construction of the world's largest hydroelectric project,
Three Gorges Dam in China, which environmentalists have seen for years as a
major threat to the local environment. Some have even dubbed it the
"Chernobyl of hydropower."

At first NGOs used their usual tactics -- they lobbied the World Bank,
contacted the Chinese government, etc. The World Bank soon announced that it
would not provide money to this project, but it became clear that the
Chinese government was impervious to the NGOs' attacks. So they revised
their tactics. They began finding out where China was getting the money to
build this dam.

This brought them rather quickly to Wall Street. They saw that in 1997
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., Credit Suisse First Boston Corp., Salomon
Smith Barney (now part of Citigroup), and BancAmerica Securities (now part
of Bank of America Corp.) underwrote a bond worth $330 million issued by the
state-owned Chinese Development Bank. Part of this money, they saw, was to
be used to finance construction of Three Gorges.

So the activists began to see if they could influence the work of these
capital sources.

They began by writing letters and making phone calls. When this didn't work
they resorted to shareholder activism. They built alliances with
institutional shareholders, socially responsible investors, and others to
put forward shareholder resolutions at the companies' annual meetings. As a
result of these campaigns, several of the financial companies agreed to talk
to the NGOs. The pressure was so strong that several financial institutions
sought (and were given) assurances from the Chinese government that money
they helped raise would not be used for Three Gorges.

The dialogue around Three Gorges continues to this day. More important, the
groups began to see that financial activism gave them considerable leverage,
so they began looking into major private banks' involvement in other
development projects around the world.

Eventually this research led to a campaign targeting Citigroup coordinated
by the California-based Rainforest Action Network, which called for people
to boycott the company and mail it their cut-up Citigroup credit cards. Make
no mistake: These campaigns can cause substantial damage, and not just in
public relations. Consider the case of Goldman Sachs and PetroChina. Last
year Goldman Sachs was chosen to help underwrite the sale of American
depositary receipts in China's restructured state oil company, PetroChina. A
source close to the deal said Goldman had initially hoped that the IPO would
raise $4 billion to $5 billion.

As it turns out, numerous environmental groups, human rights activists, and
labor unions were concerned with China's human rights record and with
PetroChina's activities in Tibet and Sudan. To make their point, they
contacted institutional investors and asked them not to invest in
PetroChina. They picketed meetings at Goldman Sachs, filed shareholder
resolutions, and had their colleagues write letters to the company.

In the end, partly because of these activities, the PetroChina IPO raised $3
billion, over $1 billion less than had originally been projected. In other
words, being in the activist spotlight cost the deal anywhere from 25% to
40% of its original value and turned out to be an embarrassment to China and
the bulge-bracket investment banking firm. Not good for company PR.

For activist groups, on the other hand, PetroChina provided a taste of the
power and leverage that was to be had by targeting banks and other financial
institutions.

The Three Gorges, Citigroup, and PetroChina campaigns are likely to be the
first of many. Financial institutions may have flown underneath activist
groups' radar in the past, but they need to realize that these groups have
upgraded their radar systems. Bankers should learn to manage NGO campaigns
or else be prepared to lose money and face a steady dose of boycotts and
protests.