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Unveiling the Shocking Truth: Top 5 Big Banks Tied to Illegal Trade in Pangolin and Leopard Parts! Are Your Savings at Risk? Discover Now! 🌐🦎 #WildlifeCrimeAlert
According to a report, major international banks are funding businesses that make traditional Chinese medicines with ingredients like leopard and pangolin skin.
Threatened status is assigned to both species.
62 banks and financial institutions have been identified by the Environmental Investigation Authority (EIA) as having investments in three pharmaceutical companies that are producing nine products that they claim contain leopard or pangolin.`
HSBC, Prudential, and Legal & General are just a few of the well-known UK financial services companies on the list. Other international investment companies represented include Goldman Sachs, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and BlackRock.
Leopards and pangolins are in danger of going extinct, so this is very likely to happen in the near future.
In an effort to ensure that their survival in the wild is not threatened, both are also listed on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) treaty, which forbids international commercial trade in them and their parts.
Tong Ren Tang Group, Tianjin Pharmaceutical Group, and Jilin Aodong Pharmaceutical Group are the three pharmaceutical firms highlighted in the EIA report.
Although not all of the businesses listed in the EIA report do so, they all do so in one or more of the three.
Leopard bone is substituted for tiger bone in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). According to folklore, tiger bone can relieve pain, strengthen bones and sinews, and help get rid of wind.
According to legend, pangolin scales promote lactation, improve blood circulation, and lessen rheumatic pain. There is no scientific evidence to support these claims.
EIA Legal & Policy Specialist Avinash Basker urged the Chinese government to “fulfill CITES recommendations and prohibit the use of the body parts of leopards, pangolins, tigers, and rhinos from all sources for any commercial purposes in its domestic markets” after the report was released.
“It is against CITES recommendations made by the international community to protect these species to use highly threatened animals like tigers, pangolins, rhinos, and leopards in traditional medicine products.
This kind of use—on a largely industrial scale—can only bring these species closer and closer to extinction while also sending consumers conflicting messages, boosting demand for their parts and derivatives, and damaging TCM’s reputation internationally, according to the expert.
“It’s particularly disappointing to see so many major banks and financial institutions effectively endorsing this damaging exploitation, especially as so many have pledged to do otherwise,” he said. “If their environmental credentials are to have any credibility, they need to divest from TCM manufacturers using threatened species at the soonest opportunity.”
According to the EIA, it was impossible to determine where the leopard or pangolin derivatives came from.
HSBC declared that it is “not a direct investor and does not have direct exposure to these companies” in a statement.
In addition, it stated that HSBC Global Asset Management Canada’s “investments in the TCM companies were limited to passive or ‘tracker’ funds rather than actively managed funds” in response to the EIA report. This means that money is automatically invested in shares based on an index they track, such as the FTSE 100.
A News channel was directed to DWS, the asset management company that was formerly a part of Deutsche Bank but is now a separate listed entity, after Deutsche Bank stated that the report focuses on asset managers.
DWS issued a statement in which it stated that it has “different ESG-related [environmental, social, and governance] policies that provide guidance on the integration of ESG information into our investment processes, engagement, and proxy voting activities, where we combine our voting rights for active and passive funds.
“Globally, there are no actively managed DWS funds invested in any of these three issuers,” stated the statement.
Legal & General Investment Management claimed it “manages many funds against a range of different index providers to meet a wide variety of different client demands”.
“LGIM is aware that one of the key drivers of nature-loss, as identified by Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service (IPBES), is ‘natural resource use and exploitation’, that covers exploitation of wild species,” the company stated.
“As such, we are developing a ‘nature framework’ that targets these IPBES drivers, that includes integration and disclosure of high-quality, consistent, location-specific data, that relates to company behaviour around these key nature-related issues.”
what are Top 5 Big Banks Linked to Products with Pangolin and Leopard Parts
According to a recent report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), the following five big banks are linked to products with pangolin and leopard parts:
1.HSBC
2.Prudential
3.Legal & General
4.Goldman Sachs
5.UBS
These include the likes of JP Morgan Chase Bank which has invested in enterprises dealing with the trade in pangolin and leopard products either way.
For instance, HSBC bank has invested on a company owning pangolin farm in Laos for the sake of their scales. Prudential is the owner of a firm running a traditional chinese firm selling leopard commodities.
Pangolin and leopard parts are heavily involved in illegal trading, which significantly contributes to the extinction of these animals.
Pangolins make up around 20% of all animal trade worldwide and their popularity is only surpassed that of leopards. This demand for their parts is motivated by traditional Chinese medicine and other cultural practices.
These banks should be requested by EIA report to divest from corporate entities that engage in the trade of leopard and pangolin products.
It further urges the consumer to apply pressure on banking institutions and demand that the same be done about the problem.
It must be stressed, however, that the banks identified above deny having anything to do with the trade for pangolin and leopard parts. Nevertheless, various ties have been reported within this trade which have been captured in the EIA report.
