The Australian nominee branches of JP Morgan, Citi Bank and HSBC Bank obscure the ownership of 51 fossil fuel projects that produce roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions each year as half of the country’s households, according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
GEM’s Global Energy Ownership Tracker, a novel dataset of asset-level energy ownership chains, has surveyed the connection of Australian nominee companies to domestic coal plants, coal mines, as well as oil and gas plants in a first-of-its-kind analysis.
The data show three nominee companies — JP Morgan Nominees Australia Pty Ltd, Citicorp Nominees Pty Ltd, and HSBC Custody Nominees (Australia) Ltd. — obscure the true owners of fossil fuel assets responsible for over 22 million tonnes of Australia’s annual CO2 emissions, equivalent to 4.4 million Australian households.
Nominee companies obscure ownership because they are paid to be listed as a shareholder of a company, even though they don’t actually own those shares. Through the use of nominee shareholder services, a nominee company appears on business registries, annual reports, and public sources, despite not actually owning shareholding in the company or asset.
This makes it incredibly difficult to pinpoint who is the actual shareholder of a fossil fuel asset.
An illustration of how nominee structures obscure ownership is Origin Energy Limited, one of Australia’s largest energy companies and carbon emitters. Over two-thirds of the company’s shares are listed as being owned by the nominee affiliates of JP Morgan, HSBC, and Citibank. However, these banks are not the actual owners of the shares.
Australia does not regulate the use of nominee shareholdering, and a large percentage of shareholding in Australia’s biggest energy companies are held through nominee companies.
Gabe Louis, Researcher for Global Energy Monitor’s Global Energy Ownership Tracker, said, “The problem with nominee companies is massive. While there’s a lot the Australian government will need to do to hit its new climate target, making the ownership of fossil fuel interests more transparent is a low-hanging fruit.”
Contact
Gabe Louis, Researcher, Global Energy Ownership Tracker
Email: [email protected]
About the Global Energy Ownership Tracker
The Global Energy Ownership Tracker (GEOT) provides information on the chain of ownership for various energy projects. The data maps each level of the chain from the direct owner (as in, the lowest-level identified owner in the chain of ownership) up to their highest-level ultimate parents (e.g., corporations, investment firms, and governments).
Ownership links are reported with the percentage of ownership, including owners that have controlling interest as well as those with minority, non-controlling interests (if over a threshold of 5% ownership).This asset ownership data set covers nine of GEM’s trackers: coal-fired power plants, oil- and gas-fired plants, coal mines, steel plants, bioenergy, iron ore, gas pipelines, oil and natural gas liquid transmission pipelines, and cement plants.