The fourth-biggest lender to Asia Pacific Resources International has cut off the giant paper manufacturer\u2019s line of credit, citing destruction of Indonesian rainforests as the reason.<\/p>\n
Spanish-based bank Santander says it has decided to \u2018not renew the current funding to April, and will not be extending further funding at this\u00a0stage\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny future loans will be conditional on April implementing new sustainability measures which address its involvement with deforestation,\u201d the bank says.<\/p>\n
The bank has lent April more than US$150m in the past four years, and in 2012 won\u00a0Trade Finance Magazine<\/em>\u2019s \u2018deal of the year\u2019 award, along with four other banks, for brokering a five-year US$600m loan to the company.<\/p>\n Santander has been under heavy pressure from environmental group Greenpeace, which accuses April of rampant deforestation in Indonesia.<\/p>\n It is a similar tactic to the one Greenpeace successfully used against Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), which eventually led to many of APP\u2019s big clients bailing over PR and environmental concerns.<\/p>\n While most Australian paper merchants abandoned APP and are only now starting to return, many are said to still be stocking April paper.<\/p>\n The NGO is hailing Santander\u2019s decision as a major victory in its campaign against April, saying that while the company has plenty more backers \u2013 22 banks have current loans \u2013 Greenpeace \u2018can and will affect its access to international markets and financial\u00a0services\u2019.<\/p>\n Greenpeace UK forests campaigner Richard George says: \u201cApril will always claim to be able to get the money elsewhere, but the cost of doing so will go up each time another customer or financier walks away.\u201d<\/p>\n Greenpeace says it will put enormous pressure on other international banks to make similar\u00a0commitments, and claims big clients are already jumping ship.<\/p>\n Other top lenders include China Development Bank, which has given out twice as much as Santander, Bank of China, Citic, and ABN Amro.<\/p>\n April a year ago launched its Sustainable Forest Management Policy (SFMP) saying it will only source fibre only from forest which does not\u00a0have a high conservation value, and only use plantations by 2019.<\/p>\n It says of it concession areas have been developed as plantation forests, while an additional 250,000 hectares are conserved and protected, and is also restoring a further 40,000 hectares of previously degraded\u00a0land.<\/p>\n Greenpeace says the commitments are a long way off, are not well defined, are weakly enforced by suppliers, and that April has a history of not following through.<\/p>\n It says in the first six months of last year April pulped 1.3 million cubic metres of natural forest in just one of its Sumatran mills.<\/p>\n This\u00a0article appeared in ProPrint’s daily newsletter. Click here to see the article in ProPrint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bank turns its back on April The fourth-biggest lender to Asia Pacific Resources International has cut off the giant paper manufacturer\u2019s line of credit, citing destruction of Indonesian rainforests as the reason. Spanish-based bank Santander says it has decided to \u2018not renew the current funding to April, and will not be extending further funding at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-news","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2534"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3439,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2534\/revisions\/3439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kainosprint.com.au\/kpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}