A Conservative MP who has made millions from legal work in offshore tax havens is helping an investor behind the now abandoned Cumbria coal mine project to sue the UK government in an overseas corporate court.
Cumbria coal mine rears its polluting head once more with a corporate court case
In September 2024, the UK High Court quashed controversial plans for a new coal mine near Whitehaven in Cumbria.
The polluting project would have been the first coal mine in over three decades. The coal project was a hotbed of deliberate disinformation. Wild claims abounded it would somehow lower the UK’s emissions.
However, judge Justice Holgate disagreed. He determined that the assumption that the mine would not increase global greenhouse emissions was “legally flawed”. In other words, the ruling nullified the planning permissions the-then Conservative government had awarded it in 2022.
And despite the then-Tory government’s suggestion it would ensure UK energy security, it couldn’t have been further from the case. As the Canary previously reported:
the coal extracted in Cumbria would not be used domestically or in the EU because of its high sulphur content. Coal from the West Cumbria mine would not be burned for power generation because the UK’s last coal fired power station will close permanently in September this year.
The coal from Whitehaven also contains too much sulphur to be allowed to be burned in the UK and EU. So even if the two steel works left in the UK weren’t transitioning in the coming years, they still wouldn’t use Whitehaven coal.
Legally, the UK government had to offer developer West Cumbria Mining (WCM) the opportunity to reapply for planning permission. However, in April 2025, WCM officially dropped plans for the project. It’s likely the groundbreaking judgement in June 2024 at the Supreme Court had something to do with this. Extinction Rebellion campaigner Sarah Finch brought the case on behalf of the Weald Action group. It means that companies now have to include the impacts of downstream emissions in their planning applications.
However, as it turns out – this isn’t the end of it. Now, WCM is slapping the UK government with an Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) case.
West Cumbria Mining comes for the UK government with an ISDS
On 8 August, the company registered the proceedings in a notoriously controversial so-called corporate court. In essence, WCM is using the UK’s investment treaty with Singapore to sue the government.
Campaigners have long warned that these ad hoc international tribunals, that governments write into trade or investment agreements, are deeply undemocratic. They allow foreign investors a bespoke legal process to challenge governments for actions they regard as ‘unfair’. Naturally, this involves government decisions that have hit the companies’ bottom line.
In 2023, a United Nations report described ISDS as “unjust, undemocratic and dysfunctional”, and recommended states withdraw their consent to arbitration under investment treaties.
The international arbitration proceeding is the first a company has brought against the UK government since 2006. It also marks the first time a company has filed against it in response to a climate policy. However, it’s hardly the first time profiteering and planet-wrecking corporations have used ISDS to stifle climate action.
ISDS tends to particularly benefit investors who are registered offshore for tax purposes. Multinationals can ‘treaty shop’ via letterbox companies. These are companies where the management and operations are located in a different jurisdiction to that of the company’s legal registration. It means they can make use of that country’s investment deal. Over $100bn in public money has been awarded to corporations through ISDS to date, with fossil fuel companies the biggest beneficiaries, raking in over $80bn since 1998.
A 2023 report by three climate-focused and legal organisations highlighted that there were (at the time):
175 treaty-based ISDS cases, closed or pending, that are tied to environmental measures.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the Center for International Environmental Law, and ClientEarth submitted the report to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment. And significantly, it concluded that:
a major obstacle to the urgent actions needed to address the planetary environmental and human rights crises.
Tax-dodging firms come for taxpayer money
So, WCM has now added its case to this notorious list.
The Canary’s Steve Topple previously reported how campaign group Coal Action Network had exposed that:
the company financing West Cumbria Mining’s Whitehaven mine project is EMR Capital Investment (No3b) Pte Ltd. The company seems to be a tax-avoider, having registered one of its offices in the Cayman Islands. Moreover, Coal Action Network claims that EMR Capital only invests in projects for a few years, then sells them on.
The company is suing through precisely this Singapore-based intermediate holding company – now named Woodhouse Investment Pte. Ltd. WCM’s ultimate parent company is EMR Capital Resources Fund 1, LP, registered in the Cayman Islands.
In other words, a likely tax-dodging company is planning to use another of its offshore subsidiaries to rinse the UK taxpayer over the Cumbria coal mine.
And who would be aiding the company to do so than none other than a Tory ex-attorney general with an atrocious parliamentary record on climate action. Conservative MP for Torridge and Tavistock Geoffrey Cox is representing WCM at the international arbitration through his lucrative second job.
Geoffrey Cox: Tory taking millions from tax havens and the taxpayer
Unsurprisingly, it isn’t the first time Cox has hit the headlines over second job sleaze.
In 2021, the ex-attorney general was set to rake in nearly £1m for his work with law firms outside his parliamentary office. Notably, Cox came under rightful scrutiny for his work defending the British Virgin Islands from a corruption and money laundering inquiry his own Tory government had set up. This was set amid the backdrop of the Tory cash for peerages corruption scandal. And it was the very same firm – Withers LLP – through which Cox shilled for the British Overseas Territory (BTO).
A 2021 Guardian analysis of Cox’s earnings revealed he had racked up – at least – a staggering £6m from his second job. Specifically, this was since entering parliament in 2005. Some of this was from work for companies in the Cayman Islands – where the parent company of WCM resides.
Recent entries in Cox’s register of interests show that the law firm Withers LLP pays him £293,400 a year. This is for just 30 hours work a month. In other words, Cox’s second job for the law firm now taking the UK government to court over the coal mine pays him at the mind-blowing rate of £815 an hour.
Second jobs, a landlord, and eye-watering expenses
He has also registered further payments from Withers LLP. In December 2023, the firm paid him £58,826.32 – for just 50 hours of work. Another £16,000 payment arrived in February 2025 for 16 hours of work.
Outside his yearly remuneration from Withers, since 2023, Cox has registered payments for legal work from multiple firms. This totals more than £340,000.
Predictably, Cox is a landlord to boot – and claims enormous expenses for his London property. In 2024 alone, he billed the taxpayer for £24,420.97 in rent costs. This was next to £17,378.24 office, and a further £5,263 in staffing costs. Cox is a reminder that we’ve been here before on rank profiteering from scum landlord MPs.
Now, he’s poised to cost the taxpayer likely gargantuan sums more in legal costs for a fossil fuel company itching to squeeze a profit out of climate breakdown.
Labour is not off the hook either over the Cumbria coal mine
In 2024, the-then Conservative government withdrew from the most litigated ISDS agreement, the Energy Charter Treaty. It cited its risks to UK net zero efforts. However, it failed to take steps with other exiting states to annul the sunset clause, meaning investors can still use it for up to 20 years. This is despite legal advice that revealed the government would not need to introduce new legislation to ratify and implement such an agreement.
Moreover, the current Labour government has refused to rescind the system as a whole. It has gone so far as to include a new ISDS provision in its ongoing negotiations around a new bilateral investment treaty with India. Its recently released Trade Strategy has also stated that it will continue inserting ISDS into future trade deals. This may potentially open up the UK to further lawsuits, and impede progress towards necessary climate action.
Trade campaign manager at Global Justice Now Cleodie Rickard said:
We’ve been calling on the government to scrap ISDS in its trade deals for years, to stop exactly this eventuality: fossil fuel companies suing us over necessary climate action.
These corporate courts mean that when governments or courts make the right decision, like halting the Cumbria coal mine, foreign corporations have the power to threaten the government in highly secretive processes. If they win, they get to pass their losses from obsolete projects onto the taxpayer.
This has to be a wake up call. The UK must finally remove this deeply undemocratic system from all its trade and investment deals and untie this straitjacket on our climate action.
Corporate courts hindering climate action
South Lakes Action on Climate Change (SLACC) tirelessly fought the Cumbria coal mine project. Member Chris Rowley said:
SLACC is very disappointed to see this attempt to sue the UK taxpayer after their proposed coal mine was refused an extraction licence and its planning application was quashed by the UK High Court. Its very hard to see what valid grounds West Cumbria Mining might have, and worrying that this might all take place behind closed doors. We hope that the UK Government will oppose this claim as strongly as they can.
Of course, it’s another case and point that MPs holding second jobs renders the idea they’re representing their constituents an absolute sham. Cox coming after the Labour government for its climate-conscious decision on polluting coal makes a mockery of the UK’s so-called democracy.
However, from a corporate-bought Tory with an appalling voting record on the climate crisis, it’s also little surprise. We should expect nothing less from the anti-net zero climate-wreckers who greenlit the project in the first place.
But until this Labour government commits to ditching existing ISDS and ensuring future trade agreements don’t include them, it’s just as culpable. It can hardly contend it’s a climate champion when it’s leaving the door wide open to the corporate courts companies have long abused to hinder climate action.
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.