In April, the House Select Committee on the CCP asked JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to stop working on the initial public offering of Contemporary Amperex Company, Limited (CATL).
The Committee pointed to CATL’s “involvement in the modernisation of China’s submarine fleet with cutting-edge lithium-ion batteries and its connections to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a sanctioned paramilitary group implicated in the extermination of Uyghur Muslims” (Business Standard, April 21, 2025).
The Committee’s chairman, John Moolenaar, said at the time that if the two banks were to go ahead with the IPO, “they risk complicity in underwriting genocide, undermining American industry, and endangering US service members…. The House Select Committee on China is actively examining these relationships, and we urge JPMorgan and Bank of America to prioritise national security and human rights in their decision-making.”
Fell on deaf ears, apparently. Now the Select Committee is subpoenaing the CEOs of JPMorgan and Bank of America for documents related to the IPO (Bloomberg, July 23, 2025). Bank of America says its cooperating.
A representative for JPMorgan declined to comment comment. But in a Bloomberg TV interview in May, CEO Jamie Dimon noted the US hadn’t placed sanctions on the Chinese battery maker and that banks do thorough due diligence before handling such deals. “If we thought it was wrong, we wouldn’t do it,” he said at the time.
The committee had called on both banks in April to withdraw from working on CATL’s market listing in Hong Kong. The lenders stuck with the deal, and CATL went on to raise $5.2 billion the next month.
The Committee had also requested documents in April and received only a few mostly already public documents.
CATL denies ever selling any products to the Chinese military.
In his April letter to JPMorgan CEO Dimon, Moolenaar wrote:
CATL’s designation by the Pentagon under the 1260H List is intended to alert U.S. entities and investors to the company’s affiliations with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and broader Chinese state objectives—particularly involving dual-use technologies critical to military and surveillance applications. CATL’s industry-leading role in battery manufacturing—a sector explicitly targeted by China’s “civil-military fusion” policy—poses significant risks to U.S. investors and national security.
Moreover, CATL maintains a close, tier-one supplier relationship with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a paramilitary entity of the Chinese state that operates forced labor camps and is directly tied to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. XPCC was the foundational entity written into the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and is connected to mass arbitrary detention, severe physical abuse, and other human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the region.
If JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said anything more specific in response to the letter than “If we thought it was wrong, we wouldn’t do it,” the rebuttal doesn’t seem to have made its way into news reports.
