Taxpayers in South Carolina likely will be on the hook for more than the $1 billion already dispersed to help a recently created Volkswagen company build its first electric vehicle plant near Columbia.
On top of that, under a state incentives agreement obtained by The Nerve, Virginia-based Scout Motors Inc., an independent company backed by the Volkswagen Group, which is headquartered in Germany, will have to comply with an ESG-related German law dealing with environmental, human rights and property rights issues.
The Nerve over the past year has reported extensively about the liberal environmental, social and governance movement in South Carolina. In a May 2022 story, for example, the president of an Anderson-based food company expressed concerns that two corporate customers, including a foreign-based company, which he asked The Nerve not to identify, were starting to pressure his business to comply with ESG-related practices.
The 192-page state incentives agreement with Scout Motors – nearly a quarter of which was partially or entirely blacked out in the copy provided to The Nerve – provides numerous taxpayer-backed benefits to the company while laying out relatively easy paths for it to meet job creation and investment requirements.
The S.C. Department of Commerce recently provided the agreement and related documents to The Nerve under the state Freedom of Information Act.
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