THE VERDICT | Who Kept their Word. Who Did not – Volume 13

This week’s pairing sits on either side of the same question: what happens after a company signs off on its sustainability claims? One institution put its numbers in front of an independent assurer, year after year, and let the verdict be public. Another is, according to the communities it has operated among for a century, trying to leave before anyone tallies the account.

Commended

KCB Group — Kenya

KCB Group’s 2025 Group Sustainability Report is, for the second consecutive year, independently assured. Deloitte Africa provided limited assurance over a defined set of sustainability KPIs, and the report is prepared with reference to IFRS S1 and IFRS S2, the GRI Standards, and the Central Bank of Kenya’s guidance on climate-related risk management. Kenya’s own regulators have not yet forced this: the Nairobi Securities Exchange and the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya have set June 2026 merely as the deadline for readiness assessments, with mandatory assurance phased in from 2028 and full ISSB implementation not required until 2027. KCB adopted early and repeated the exercise rather than treating it as a one-off.

The numbers behind the claim

• KSh 53.2 billion in green loans disbursed in the reporting year, taking the green portfolio to 25.84% of the total loan book — above the Group’s own 25% target, and up from 21.6% the previous year.
• KSh 578.3 billion in loans screened for environmental and social risk during the year under the Group’s Environmental and Social Due Diligence process, bringing the cumulative total screened since 2020 to over KSh 2.5 trillion.
• KSh 24.1 billion of the green loan book — nearly half — independently verified using the Climate Assessment for Financial Institutions (CAFI) tool, on top of the Deloitte assurance over the wider report.
• No other Tier 1 bank or large-cap NSE issuer has publicly confirmed an equivalent, independently assured, IFRS S1/S2-aligned sustainability report, as of this year.

This is the difference between compliance and governance. Compliance waits for the deadline. Governance treats external verification as something a board wants repeated annually, not something a regulator eventually forces once. A limited-assurance opinion from a named audit firm, against named frameworks, disclosed for a second straight year, is a claim a stakeholder can actually interrogate — and interrogate again next year, against the same yardstick. KCB earns this commendation not for the content of its sustainability report, which CSR Reporters has not independently verified, but for the discipline of subjecting that content to scrutiny most of its peers have chosen to defer.

Called Out

Anglo American — South Africa

Anglo American was founded in South Africa in 1917 and, at its peak, its stable of companies accounted for more than half of all value listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. In September 2025 it agreed to merge with Canadian miner Teck Resources to form Anglo Teck, a deal that would relocate the combined group’s head office from London to Vancouver. It had already sold its full shareholding in Anglo American Platinum, since renamed Valterra Platinum. Mining-Affected Communities United in Action reads the pattern as a slow-motion exit engineered to outrun accountability for a century of extraction, rather than a routine corporate restructuring.

The allegation, in MACUA’s own terms

• Tax and royalties paid by Anglo American to the South African government fell by 85% between 2021 and 2024, while the company’s local employee headcount fell by 22% over roughly the same period, according to figures MACUA presented to Parliament.
• Unfinished Social and Labour Plan commitments and what communities describe as a substantial, historical social debt remain outstanding — most visibly around Kriel in Mpumalanga and Jagersfontein in the Free State.
• In Carletonville’s Khutsong South, residents say abandoned, unrehabilitated open shafts and tailings dams have become sites for illegal mining and associated violent crime — what one lawyer representing affected communities has called a legacy of unaddressed harm.
• MACUA’s memorandum, delivered directly to company officials outside Anglo American’s Johannesburg offices, demands a public, independently verified Exit Impact Assessment covering outstanding environmental liabilities, incomplete SLP obligations, long-term socio-economic impacts on host communities, and post-closure livelihood plans — plus a binding settlement process with affected communities.

Where it stands

The timeline runs from a November 2025 parliamentary petition, through a February 2026 protest and memorandum at Anglo’s Rosebank headquarters, to a Parliamentary Mineral and Petroleum Resources Committee session in August 2026 that agreed to seek further information from the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, Anglo American, Seriti Coal, and affected municipalities. At the company’s own June 2026 AGM, a London Mining Network representative put the reparations question to Anglo directly on MACUA’s behalf; the response repeated the company’s standing position rather than engaging the specifics.

Anglo American’s position is that it is not exiting South Africa: the merged Anglo Teck entity will keep its JSE listing, no South African assets, licences, or operating companies move anywhere, and every obligation under the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, environmental legislation, Social and Labour Plans, and worker-related commitments remains fully enforceable regardless of where the head office sits. The company has called MACUA’s exit framing false and misleading. What it has not done, as of this writing, is produce the independent Exit Impact Assessment MACUA is asking for, or otherwise settle, item by item, the specific liabilities the petition names. A change of registered domicile is not, on its own, evidence that the underlying obligations were met — and a company’s insistence that obligations remain enforceable is not the same as an independent accounting showing they have been discharged.

This call-out is not a claim that Anglo American has broken the law; South African regulators, not CSR Reporters, are positioned to determine that, and the parliamentary committee’s information-gathering process is still open. It is a claim that a governance failure exists in the gap itself: a hundred years of extraction should not be able to close out on a corporate restructuring timetable, with the burden of proof left on the communities asking for an accounting rather than on the company that would be providing one.

The throughline: assurance is not a report-season exercise. It has to hold at entry, throughout operation, and at exit — or it was never governance, only paperwork timed to the parts of the relationship a company wanted witnessed.

About CSR Reporters

CSR Reporters is a pan-African independent accountability and sustainability intelligence platform, working with corporates, investors, and institutions to test CSR and ESG claims against evidence rather than narrative.

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