London: Boeing is stepping up pressure on opponents of the US Export-Import Bank with threats to shift manufacturing abroad if the agency that finances purchases by foreign customers is killed off next month.

The threats come as a new push is being made in Congress to find ways of wresting reauthorisation of the bank from a committee controlled by one of the agency’s fiercest opponents.

Scott Scherer, Boeing’s head of regulatory strategy at Boeing Capital, said the aerospace and defence group would “not sit idly by” if the ExIm Bank’s mandate was not renewed by the end of June. “Boeing is not going to let itself be hurt by the lack of an ExIm Bank,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If it means sourcing ... to other countries who will support us we may have to look at that. Other countries have more aggressive export policies. We will find an alternative.”

Boeing, along with other big US industrial companies such as General Electric and Caterpillar, has been leading the charge to rescue the ExIm Bank from conservative critics, who want to shut down what they describe as “corporate welfare”.

Industry lobbyists have argued they need the bank to compete with foreign rivals whose government credit agencies will continue to support foreign purchases. The bank is particularly important to Boeing, which accounted for roughly a third of all of ExIm’s commitments between 2007 and 2013.

But Conservatives in Congress led by Jeb Hensarling, the Texan who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, accuse the bank of cronyism and corruption, and have made killing the bank a Republican cause cElebre. They have managed to attract the support of almost all of the party’s current presidential contenders including Jeb Bush.

In order to get around Hensarling, Democrats and some pro-business Republicans have floated the idea of attaching the bank’s reauthorisation to trade legislation to give President Barack Obama the “fast-track” authority he needs from Congress to conclude a major Pacific Rim trade bill.

But that fast-track legislation already faces a tough fight in the lower House of Representatives. Backers worry that adding an amendment reauthorising funding for the ExIm Bank could erode needed Republican support and draw only a handful of Democrats, most of whom are opposed to the fast-track bill.

“The losses on the Republican side would far outweigh the gains on the Democratic side,” one Democratic aide said.

Nevertheless, Scherer was insistent that a way would be found to break the Congressional stalemate and put reauthorisation to a vote. “Stay tuned to probably the end of next week to see if that actually happens. We are going to get it done. We have to get it done ... it is the right thing to do.”