Attorney General Sues ExxonMobil for Misleading Investors

October 30th, 2018

Last Wednesday, state Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that she has filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corporation, alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business. (Read the lawsuit here.)

The lawsuit alleges that while the company assured investors that it was accounting for the likelihood of increasingly stringent regulation of greenhouse gas emissions – which Exxon emits in large quantities – the company did not actually do so. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, the state pension fund for public employees, owns about $1.5 billion in shares in Exxon.

Attorney General Underwood said:

“Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon – which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions. Yet as our investigation found, Exxon often did no such thing.  Instead, Exxon built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations.”

A spokesman for ExxonMobil called the lawsuit “meritless.” He said:

“The New York attorney general’s office doubled down on its tainted, meritless investigation by filing a complaint against ExxonMobil.  These baseless allegations are a product of closed-door lobbying by special interests, political opportunism and the attorney general’s inability to admit that a three-year investigation has uncovered no wrongdoing.”