After the BTC Consortium, led by BP, formally asked the UK's export credit agency, ECGD, for financial support for its BTC oil pipeline project, ECGD's Business Principles Unit (BPU) assessed the potential environmental and social impacts of the project. The BPU's findings and recommendations were critical to ECGD's issuing significant financial guarantees for the project in February 2004.
When The Corner House put in an information request for a copy of the BPU's report, it was refused. Only after appeals and counter appeals was the information finally released in August 2009.