The SEC securities fraud lawsuit affects your sustainability report. Here’s how.
The agency’s securities fraud lawsuit presents extreme facts but offers lessons for communicators of every company.
More than 70% of executives in North America say their companies are guilty of greenwashing, or “overstating their sustainability efforts,” according to a recent survey of nearly 1,500 chief financial officers and other C-Suite executives by Harris Poll for Google Cloud, the web services provider.
It should come as no surprise that the Securities and Exchange Commission is suing a company for securities fraud, pointing to allegedly false statements about safety in its sustainability reports.
In the same survey, more than a third of executives in the U.S. admitted their “companies treat sustainability as a PR stunt.”
Uh-oh.
The case, filed April 28, 2022, is a sign that the SEC is now paying close attention to public claims about Environmental, Social and Governance practices, and not just focused on dry filings with the agency. It is raising concerns of securities lawyers and corporate communications executives.
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