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Dutch oil company settles illegal dumping charges

An oil trading company based in the Netherlands has agreed to pay almost US$200 million to the government of Ivory Coast to settle claims that it illegally dumped toxic petrochemical waste in Abidjan last August.

The company, Trafigura, said the payment was not an admission of fault by any party. It said the money would help pay for a new waste disposal plant, a new hospital and an audit to determine the cause and effects of the dumping.

At least 10 people died and thousands more were sickened in Abidjan after hundreds of tons of toxic sludge, pumped from the hold of a ship named the Probo Koala, was dumped at more than a dozen sites, some of them densely populated.

About 100,000 people sought medical treatment, swamping the country's health care system, and public outrage at the suspicion that corrupt government officials had allowed the dumping led to the resignation of the entire Cabinet, though much of it was later reinstated.

In announcing the settlement on Tuesday, Trafigura said in a prepared statement that three of its employees, who had been held since September, had been released.

Trafigura had leased the Probo Koala, a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag, to transport petrochemical products. It arrived in Amsterdam on July 2, on its way to Estonia, to unload what the company said was 250 tonnes of "regular slops," wash water from a ship's holds, which is normally laced with oil, gas, caustic soda or other chemicals.

But when Amsterdam port workers began pumping out the tanker, they noticed that the liquid was thicker than normal and smelled foul; they refused to finish the job for the agreed-upon price, about US$15,000, telling the company that safe disposal in Europe would cost about US$300,000. (Trafigura said that with the extra cost of the delays, the amount could have been twice that.)

The waste was eventually shipped to West Africa, where it was dumped by an Ivorian company called Tommy for US$20,000.

An inquiry by the Ivorian government later said that the company might have been created just to dump the waste, and that it had "neither the qualifications, the competence or the technical ability to treat this waste."

President Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast described the settlement as a "a good agreement that will allow the state to compensate the victims."
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