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You don't hear talk about victory very often from the little guy after a lawsuit with a big corporation. Yet Eliance Kouassi, president of a victims' group in the Ivory Coast, is quoted in the Guardian saying, "It's a real victory for us," about a Dutch court's finding that multinational oil-trading corporation Trafigura is guilty of illegally dumping toxic waste in the West African country.
The incident in question is the disposal by a Trafigura-chartered tanker, the Probo Koala, of 400 tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast four years ago.
How it happened
The toxic waste that the Probo Koala had been carrying around was dumped in August 2006 at 15 locations around Abidjan, the Ivorian capital. People quickly became sick, and in 2009, 30,000 Ivorians filed a class action lawsuit in London for damages from Trafigura.
The Independent explains what was on the ship:
For three months, the tanker chartered by Trafigura, a commodities trading multinational based in Switzerland, had been based in the Mediterranean as a sort of floating processing plant carrying out the purification of a cargo of low-grade gasoline known as coker naphtha bought from a Mexican refinery.
By adding caustic soda and a chemical catalyst to the cheap and sulphurous oil, it was "washed" to produce sellable petrol and slops containing a cocktail of water and chemical by-products – including foul-smelling compounds called mercaptans.
The waste from the process, which is prohibited in many parts of the world, ended up being more costly to dump in Amsterdam than Trafigura wanted to pay, so the Probo Koala left for Estonia, picked up some unleaded petrol to deliver to Nigeria, where it tried—again unsuccessfully—to dump the waste, and finally did so upon reaching the Ivory Coast.
The court has finally ruled against Trafigura, but the company certainly did its best to cover up the damage both to its reputation and the harm it caused in Africa. The Guardian explains some of the company's attempt at a cover-up:
Trafigura obtained a superinjunction, banning the Guardian not only from revealing the contents of a leaked scientific report, but also even from disclosing that the company had gone to court to get such an injunction. The Guardian, and ultimately, many politicians and members of the public, saw this as a Kafkaesque assault on free speech, which had to be defeated.
A Labour MP put down a parliamentary question revealing the existence both of the Minton report (the document in question), and of Trafigura's injunction suppressing its contents... Trafigura now claimed the Guardian was even banned from reporting what had happened in parliament.At that point, the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger... posted on Twitter the fact that the Guardian was banned from reporting parliament, for reasons it was unable to disclose. Within hours, thousands of citizen detectives had worked out for themselves what information was on the online parliamentary order paper, and tweets were circulating around the world, giving away the secrets Trafigura had hired expensive lawyers to suppress.
So the word is out and the Dutch court has doled out its punishments: a five-year suspended jail sentence to the captain of the ship, a 25,000-Euro fine for Trafigura employee Naeem Ahmed, who was found guilty of attempting to dispose of the waste in Amsterdam while concealing its "dangerous nature"—and a fine of 1 million Euros for the company, though some have pointed out how negligible that is to a company that brings in tens of billions a year. It's also half the amount that the prosecutors were going for. No word on what extent of the damage, to the environment and to people's health, will be repaired with that money—assuming it is paid out and that Trafigura does not win the appeal it is considering filing—but it's a start.
As for what Trafigura has to say for itself, the company "is pleased to have been acquitted of the charge of forgery," but "is disappointed by the judges’ ruling on the other two, which it believes to be incorrect." But the court seemed to agree with prosecutor Look Bougert, who told the court that Trafigura put "self-interest above people's health and the environment."
More about toxic waste dumping:
Haiti: Toxic Waste Dump Site Before the Earthquake, Lucrative Cleanup Contract After
Toxic Waste Ship Sunk by the Mafia Found in Italy - At Least 32 More Suspected
Toxic Shipwreck in Madagascar Kills Whales, Makes Locals Sick
California Toxic Waste Dump Feared to Cause Fatal Birth Defects
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