ING response to controversy around a project in Angola
Various parties have expressed their concern about an ING-financed project for land reclamation off the coast of Angola’s capital Luanda. These concerns relate to alleged human rights violations and possible corruption.
In late 2014, ING was approached by Dutch dredging company Van Oord with regard to the potential financing of a land reclamation project. Given the size of the project and Van Oord’s project costs, ING and two other banks jointly provided a loan in late 2016 to the Angolan Ministry of Finance to finance Van Oord’s dredging activities. The Dutch government, through insurer Atradius Dutch State Business, provided credit insurance to the loan.
In order to prevent human rights violations or corruption, ING conducts a thorough due diligence process before committing to any project. During the due diligence process it became clear that the consortium partner of Van Oord was connected to the daughter of the former president of Angola, Isabel dos Santos. We ensured the loan was exclusively intended to finance Van Oord's work and that there was no flow of money from the loan to its consortium partner. At the request of the Ministry of Finance, the payments were to be made from the loan directly to Van Oord for the works performed by them.
The basis for the environmental and social due diligence is the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment report (ESIA), which had been written in 2015. This report did not mention resettlement for this project or in the project area. Next to the due diligence process that was carried out by our own experts, in early 2016 an internationally reputable environmental consultant performed an independent gap analysis of the ESIA and also visited the project area. Their report confirmed that the project did not require the physical resettlement of local communities. They did identify the need for financial compensation for fishermen that needed to be further assessed and mitigated in order to meet international standards.
Only recently was ING informed that approximately 3,000 families that lived in the project area have been resettled in 2013, before ING’s involvement in the project. This information was new to us and was not mentioned in the aforementioned ESIA and Environmental and Social Due Diligence Report dated 2016. We now know that the resettlement took place as part of another project, before Van Oord started its activities in Angola and years before our experts visited the project site.
ING condemns the practice of forced evictions. Resettlement of communities is only to be performed in exceptional cases and only with due care and in accordance with best international practice. If necessary, fair compensation and preferably livelihood restauration should be provided by the party performing the resettlement.
Although neither ING nor Van Oord are in any way involved in the alleged forced resettlement, we will use our influence in our engagement with the government of Angola to find out what happened before our involvement in the project, and if people were not treated in the right way, we will discuss what can be done to help them at this stage.