Hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen have filed claims seeking compensation from a Taiwanese steel company that acknowledged its toxic chemicals caused a massive fish kill, a local priest helping the fishermen said yesterday.
The factory, owned by Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corp (台塑河靜鋼鐵興業), said in June that it was responsible for the pollution that killed large numbers of fish off the central Vietnamese coast in April, and pledged to pay US$500 million to clean it up and compensate affected people.
The pollution created the nation’s worst environmental disaster, devastating the regional fishing and tourism industries, and sparked protests in Vietnam.
Photo: Reuters
Catholic priest Dang Huu Nam, who led the group of fishermen, said 506 petitions had been submitted to the People’s Court in Ky Anh town, Ha Tinh Province, where the massive fish kill occurred.
“Based on the fact that Formosa admitted their mistake, based on the Vietnamese laws and the losses suffered by the fishermen, they have submitted their claims and they demand that Formosa be closed and compensate their losses, as well as material and health losses they may suffer in the future,” Nam said by telephone from the courthouse.
Local court officials were not available for comment.
The priest said many more fishermen are completing their files and he expected more than 100,000 fishermen to file petitions.
He said the fishermen on Monday traveled 200km in 15 buses to the People’s Court in Ky Anh, which received 199 petitions on Monday and another 307 yesterday.
About 5,000 people from the town gathered outside the courthouse on Monday to show their support, he said.
Nam said the court would decide whether to process or reject their claims, or refer their cases to a higher authority.
Under Vietnamese law, the claims must be filed individually.
Lawyer Tran Vu Hai said the fishermen’s actions to file their claims may not lead to their cases being brought to trial, but could open a way for Formosa and the fishermen to “talk directly with each other” for a negotiated deal.
An estimated 115 tonnes of fish washed ashore along more than 200km of the central coast in April, the government said in a report to the National Assembly in July.
The disaster harmed the livelihoods of more than 200,000 people, including 41,000 fishermen, it said.
Formosa Ha Tinh’s steel complex includes a steel plant, a power plant and a deep sea port.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Micron Technology Inc is a driving force pushing the US Congress to pass legislation that would put new export restrictions on equipment its Chinese competitors use to make their chips, according to people familiar with the matter. A US House of Representatives panel yesterday was to vote on the “MATCH Act,” a bill designed to close gaps in restrictions on chipmaking equipment. It would also pressure foreign companies that sell equipment to Chinese chipmaking facilities to align with export curbs on US companies like Lam Research Corp and Applied Materials Inc. The bill targets facilities operated by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies Inc
Singapore-based ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab Holdings’ planned acquisition of Foodpanda’s Taiwan operations has yet to enter the formal review stage, as regulators await supplementary documents, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday. Acting FTC Chairman Chen Chih-min (陳志民) told the legislature’s Economics Committee that although Grab submitted its application on March 27, the case has not been officially accepted because required materials remain incomplete. Once the filing is finalized, the FTC would launch a formal probe into the deal, focusing on issues such as cross-shareholding and potential restrictions on market competition, Chen told lawmakers. Grab last month announced that it would acquire
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
RSS