Trafigura Knew!

Dumping Toxic Waste in Africa

Images of the Day: Trafigura knew of Probo Koala deadly cargo

Can you differentiate between Trafigura business activities and the mafia?

Go “Trafigura” it out!

Estonia: The Probo Koala, branded a toxic crime scene by environmental activists who accuse Trafigura of intoxicating Africans with a poisonous waste shipment.  Photograph: Christian Aslund/Greenpeace.

[In 1996,] 400 tonnes of toxic waste from the cargo vessel Probo Koala, chartered to British-based oil trading company Trafigura, were offloaded at the West African port of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. The waste was loaded on to trucks and dumped around the city. Over the following weeks, thousands of residents found themselves choking and coughing, some vomiting. At least 10 are said to have died and many still bare the scars. Now 30,000 Ivorians are taking a class action at the high court in London asking for damages from Trafigura, who denied they were responsible for any deaths or injuries. —Guardian UK.

BBC Newsnight has uncovered evidence revealing that oil-trading company Trafigura knew that waste dumped in Ivory Coast in 2006 was hazardous.

A Trafigura victim. Source of the Image

A civil protection member of Ivory Coast points at a site polluted with toxic waste from the Probo Koala ship at the Akouedo district in Abidjan on September 19, 2006. In mid-August 2006 the Probo Koala ship unloaded in Abidjan more than 500 tonnes of a highly toxic mixture of oil residue and caustic soda used to rinse out the ship’s tanks. The trial of 12 people charged with involvement in the 2006 toxic waste pollution scandal in the Ivory Coast is set to go ahead on September 29, 2008 according to court documents. The toxic sludge, brought into Ivory Coast by Dutch-based multinational trading company Trafigura, killed 16 people and caused an estimated 95,000 people to seek medical attention. Photo: Getty Images, 1996. Caption: Daily Life. Image may be subject to copyright.

Trafigura, which had first denied liability, has now offered to pay damages to settle a class action brought on behalf of 31,000  injured claimants.

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Two jailed for toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast

Trafigura, Dutch-based international oil trader, escapes punishment for toxic poisoning

Two men were jailed for 20 and five years over the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast that killed 17 people and sickened thousands more in 2006.

The two were found guilty of distributing the waste from a ship chartered by the Dutch-based international oil trader, Trafigura, at open sites across Abidjan, Ivory Coasts’s largest city and its banking and commercial center.

Trafigura was exempted from legal proceedings as they had already agreed to a $200 million out-of-court compensation settlement with the Ivory Coast authorities.

“Defense lawyers in the Abidjan hearings had repeatedly complained that it was unfair for their clients to be in the dock when executives from Trafigura were not on trial.” Reuters said.

Poor inhabitants of Abidjan laundering clothes in the river. Image: Ferdinand Reusat Source: http://flickr.com/photos/72092071@N00/807867553. Licensed under the terms of the cc-by-sa-2.0.

In 2006, thousands of Abidjan residents required hospital treatment for breathing difficulties, diarrhoea and vomiting after exposure to noxious fumes from the deadly cargo of the Panamanian-registered Probo Koala. Read more…

Seeking Toxic Asylum

submitted by a reader

Partenope: Naples Garbage Opera

Protagonists:

• Queen Partenope: Played by the entire population of Naples and Campania [and the estimated 1.2 million tons of rotting garbage]
• Prince Armindo of Rhodes: played by Il Duce [the leader] of Italy Silvio Berlusconi and his gang.
• Prince Arsace of Corinth: The garbage incinerators in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere
• Prince Emilio of Cumae [who is at war with Naples and with Queen Partenope] : Played by the Camorra mafia

Full List of Actors:

• Il Duce [the leader] of Italy Silvio Berlusconi
• Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo
• Camorra mafia
• Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, head of the influential Italian Bishops Conference
• The corrupt regional governor, Antonio Bassolino, and 27 others under house arrest.
• City’s chief officer and special commissioner Alessandro Pansa (one of the 27)
• Rosanna Laraia, head of waste management in Italy’s Ministry for the Environment

• Billions of missing, misappropriated, or unaccounted for euros [ € billions ]

• Environmental campaigner Francesco Pascale
• Sergio Sedia and his wife Giulia
• President Giorgio Napolitano
• Just over 1 million Neapolitans (and a further 5 million people living in Campania region and the province of Naples.)
• Hundreds of police officers in riot gears
• Probably as many as 10 million “super-charged” rats and 100 million cockroaches living in the garbage piles throughout the city of Naples

Composer:

• Germany’s George Frideric Handel

Act I – Seeking Toxic Asylum

In Act I of the famous Naples Garbage Opera, Partenope, Sergio Sedia and his wife Giulia request “toxic asylum” in Switzerland.

Sergio and his wife Giulia live in the “Triangle of Death” near Naples where the mafia has illegally dumped tons of toxic waste. British medical journal, The Lancet, reported in 2004 on “considerably higher cancer and deformity rates” in the area compared with other parts of the Campania region near Naples.

[Other than rats and cockroaches, what sort of vermin would transform its place of habitat to this?] A woman wearing a filtered mask walks past piles of trash thrown into a street intersection in protest in Naples May 16, 2008. REUTERS/Ciro Messere/Agnfoto. Image may be subject to copyright. See FEWW Fair Use Notice!

“The (Italian) government has not protected my right to health, and in this area people are dying of cancers caused by tonnes of chemical and toxic waste illegally dumped here for more than 20 years,” said Sergio.

Camorra mafia has been secretly dumping thousands of tonnes of industrial waste since the 1980s in what is “the heart of some of Italy’s best farm land,” environmental groups said.

“This area is nearly entirely agricultural, there are no factories, but has mortality rates for cancers linked to pollution higher than the national average. Here one doesn’t die of a heart attack or an accident, but from tumors,” said Sedia, 34, who works in the finance industry.

Silvio Berlusconi Prime Minister of Italy (President of the Council of Ministers of Italy). Born 29 September 1936, he is an entrepreneur, media proprietor and Head of the

“What I eat and breathe every day makes me afraid because of the products — the asbestos, the lead, the dioxins that are there in the air, the soil, the ground water,” he told AFP.

Fearing also for the health of their unborn child, said Sedia, “we decided to demand protection abroad and our choice fell on Switzerland.”

“We want to save ourselves, and only another country can help us, because if waste is one enemy, the Italian state is another in continuing to deny there is a problem in this area.”

“The Italian authorities are trying to act as if the problem of contamination doesn’t exist,” he said.

“I am not very confident when I see the authorities test mozzarella (over dioxin poisoning) because it is a valuable product, but doesn’t conduct tests on us citizens because we don’t have any commercial value.”

Earlier this year samples of mozzarella cheese, made from buffalo milk, were found to have highlevels of the toxic compound dioxin. As a result, buffalo farms in the Campania region were quarantined.

Japan, Singapore and South Korea banned the import of Italian mozzarella, earlier this year. (Source)

continued …

Related Links:

• Naples Garbage Opera – Act II
• Naples Garbage: First Commercial Dividends
• Naples: The Triangle of Death