ABN AMRO has been awarded the 'Schone Schijn Award' (Hypocricy Award) at a glamorous event organised by Milieudefensie - Friends of the Earth Netherlands (a member of BankTrack).

ABN AMRO received the award for being one of the lead banks in financing environmentally and socially disruptive oil and gas projects such as the Chad-Cameroon and the Baku Ceyhan oil pipelines.

Milieudefensie singled out the interest expressed by ABN AMRO -and several other Equator banks- to finance the huge Sakhalin II oil and gas project in the Russian Far East as especially worriesome, given the well documented social and environmental risks posed by this project.

According to Milieudefensie, financing such projects is incompatible with a good faith application of the Equator Principles and makes a mockery of the claim of the bank to have robust environmental policies and screening procedures in place.

ABN AMRO, present at the award ceremony, insisted that the key problem is not with companies such as ABN AMRO but with filaing local governments. It refused to accept the prize but took it home 'to keep its staff on alert'.