Massachusetts’s attorney general office filed a complaint Tuesday accusing ExxonMobil of defrauding investors on matters related to the company’s handling of global warming.
AG Maura Healey has long sought documents from Exxon about the oil producer’s climate, energy and financial dealings since 2016.
Her complaint, which claims Exxon duped shareholders about the risk of climate change, is closely aligned with a lawsuit New York made leveled against Exxon in October.
The cases in New York and Massachusetts are similar in some respects, but they do deviate on two key issues.
Exxon has turned over more than 1 million pages of documents to Underwood’s office while Healey’s office has received no documentation.
“Investment advisors at those entities make decisions about purchasing and selling Exxon securities based on what Exxon communicates to them, whether directly or indirectly, through private and public statements about future earnings and risks to the value of its assets over time,” Haley, a Democrat, said in the court brief.
She said the court brief was made on behalf of Massachusetts’ public-sector funds that hold billions of dollars worth of Exxon stock.
“Indeed, at least one Massachusetts-based investment firm manager has complained publicly about how Exxon’s ‘willfully distorted view’ on environmental risks to its assets’ value was harming investors,” the brief added.
Exxon has not responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about Healey’s complaint.
The Texas-based company has painted the years-long probe as an attempt to restrict the company’s First Amendment rights while providing thousands of documents to investigators.
The company and New York have haggled over the issue for years before the state officially pursued legal charges.
Both legal actions stem primarily from a probe conducted by former New York AG Eric Schneiderman in 2015 that was based on reports from Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times.
They claimed Exxon spent years hiding information from shareholders showing the risks climate change posed to their investments.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) engaged in a similar investigation into whether the company overvalued assets in the face of future climate regulations.
The SEC eventually dropped the probe in August and noted in a letter that it would not recommend enforcement actions. The message included a disclaimer stating the probe could be reopened at a later date.
Editors’ note: A previous version of this article inaccurately identified Massachusetts legal pursuit as a lawsuit. The state filed a complaint against Exxon. The article has been updated to reflect the changes.
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But with what power can a man, a company, a nation, a humility be able to fight global warming, or global cooling? To pretend that something like this is possible is to overestimate the power of man, and to place him outside of nature, as a kind of god, being that he is part of it. The heating or cooling of the climate escapes the power of man, as well as the movements of rotation and translation of the planet. Is the world going to cool? Yes, it’s going to get cold. Is the world going to heat up? Yes, it’s going to heat up. Will it do it indefinitely? No, he will not. The fact that the world is warming up, and that it is getting hotter, and that the only thing it will do is warm up, is pure hoaxes. The world warms and cools daily; only sometimes it freezes, an important part of it, or all of it, is covered with snow; and others, temperatures cool, and even heat up. Because the world did not start yesterday, and we can not ignore its long history of warming and cooling; in which, by the way, the most terrible periods of cooling have been. We can hardly fight against ourselves, and will we be able to fight against warming, or cooling? Absurd. In addition, the world seems to have taken a cooling course today, so, instead of being determined that we must fight against global warming, we should be considering how we are going to face a drastic decrease in global temperatures.
Cold killed the mighty dinosaurs.
Absurd. Yes, And arrogant!
Thanks for bringing Alan Carlin back to life, he was a genius! “People are fucked” – never more truth in so few words! Cheers!
Oops, George Carlin, not Alan Carlin; sorry!
How incredibly stupid can a state get?! There is no limit, it seems.
Al Gore Greenpeace,Leonardo DiCaprio,Laurie David,Barack Obama,the United Nations Etc have been duping the public for years over this Global Warming/Climate Change hoax
It is my opinion that Exxon-Mobil did not dupe anyone, including shareholders.
The ignorant AGs steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that AGW is a scam and has NOT been proven.
Why would Exxon-Mobil release info on a falsehood?
With the title wave of law suits against Exxon, with them continuing to be dismissed in court, Exxon has a very valid hassassment law suits. I can’t understand why they don’t take such action. Right now the law suits are filed under the assumption of nothing to lose. If Exxon would sue those who are suing them, then the nothing to lose assumption would be wrong and there would be fewer hassassment law suits.
The concept that the left is using against Exxon could easily be reversed. What about suing on behave of investors in green energy because these companies failed to disclose that anthropological climate change isn’t happening?