Barclays Challenged Over Financing of Coal Plant Threatening the Sundarbans

Three people from Bangladesh have done what our regulators refuse to do: they've named the money. According to The Guardian, three complainants from the Sundarbans region have filed a formal case against Barclays with the UK's Office for Responsible Business Conduct, alleging the bank breached international guidelines by underwriting companies behind the Rampal coal-fired power plant — the emission-heavy Maitree super thermal project — sited on the edge of the world's largest mangrove forest and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The complaint traces Barclays financing to India's state-owned NTPC Ltd and bond issuances for the Export-Import Bank of India between 2016 and 2019, capital that flowed directly into a facility now pumping mercury and arsenic into the Pasur River, the lifeline of a forest millions depend on. This is what extraction looks like when it wears a suit and a corporate logo.

The paper trail of complicity

The complaint, assembled with support from King's Legal Clinic, is not speculative. Barclays underwrote debt for NTPC, a joint-venture partner behind Rampal, and arranged bond issues for India's export credit agency that helped bankroll construction. Meanwhile, French banks looked at the same project and walked away over environmental and social concerns. The financial logic is textbook: underwrite the debt, collect the fees, let the toxicology reports show up later in someone else's rivers. Sharif Jamil, a Dhaka-based environmental campaigner and one of the three complainants, has argued that heavy-metal pollution from the plant and surrounding industry is moving through the Sundarbans' interconnected waterways. A study published last November found elevated mercury and arsenic concentrations in water samples, with the highest readings in the Pasur itself. Researchers flagged industrial discharge and port traffic from the plant as significant contamination sources — alongside the obvious climate costs of locking in new coal capacity in a delta already drowning under rising seas.

A forest that cannot be repriced

Let me be clear about what is being destroyed. The Sundarbans is not a line item. It is more than 100 islands spanning the Bangladesh-India border, home to the Bengal tiger and roughly four million people whose food, water, and cyclone protection depend on those mangroves. The mangroves function as a natural storm barrier — exactly the infrastructure climate-vulnerable communities cannot afford to lose. UNESCO warned in 2016 that air and water pollution from the plant would "irreversibly damage" the World Heritage property. That warning was treated as a cost of doing business. Barclays' response to this complaint will tell us whether the UK's much-touted responsible business conduct framework has any teeth, or whether it is the kind of performative oversight that lets ministers push the Bank of England on digital currency innovation while British banks keep underwriting climate wreckage abroad. We have seen this playbook before: modernize the brand, leave the balance sheet untouched.

What to watch

The Office for Responsible Business Conduct now has to decide whether Barclays' due diligence met international standards on environmental and human rights. A finding against the bank would open a precedent for cross-border climate liability under UK oversight. Either way, the complaint itself is a structural act: it forces a public record of who financed what, and when. That record is what movements build on.