According to the NSW Minerals Council, of particular concern was the direct association of the EDO with the Australian anti-coal movement, outlined in a document secretly prepared by the activist group entitled, “Stopping the Australian Coal Boom: funding proposal for the Australian anti-coal movement”

A NSW Minerals Council spokesman said the EDO had been active in its support of environmental activist Jonathan Moylan.

Moylan was recently charged by police in relation to the hoax financial announcement emailed to media outlets that impacted the share price of Whitehaven Coal.

The EDO has received millions of taxpayer dollars from the NSW government, enabling it to provide legal assistance to those planning an extreme anti-mining agenda, and to help run legal appeals against planning decisions made by the NSW government itself, according to the NSW Minerals Council.

EDO documents outline a deliberate campaign to use legal processes to “disrupt and delay” key projects and infrastructure and to “get in front of the critical projects to slow them down in the approval process, the NSW Minerals Council said.

“The most dramatic funding increases occurred predominantly during the last NSW Labor government, and at a time when current federal Greens candidate for the Senate, Cate Faehrmann, was an EDO board member.”