A Dutch court fined commodities trader Trafigura Beheer 1 million euros (US$1.3 million) yesterday for shipping harmful waste to Ivory Coast and for failing to inform authorities of its danger.
Presiding Judge Frans Bauduin said that Trafigura was fined because it did what European regulations on toxic waste aimed to prevent, “namely the export of waste to the Third World and harming the environment.”
“A company with a reputation like Trafigura’s would have been expected to have acted in a different manner,” Bauduin said at the Amsterdam district court.
The Ukranian captain of the ship that had transported the waste and a Trafigura employee also received suspended jail sentences in the case, Bauduin said, and the employee was also fined 25,000 euros for overseeing the delivery of waste while not disclosing its harmful nature.
Prosecutors had asked for a fine of 2 million euros for the company.
Trafigura said in a statement it would study the ruling with a view to filing an appeal.
“While Trafigura is pleased to have been acquitted of the charge of forgery it is disappointed by the judge’s ruling on the other two, which it believes to be incorrect,” it said.
“Concerning the delivery of dangerous goods it is important that the court has noted that there was limited risk to human health from these slops, and indeed no damage occurred in Amsterdam,” the company said.
Trafigura — which has made settlements to prevent or end court proceedings in Ivory Coast and the UK — had chartered the ship Probo Koala, which wanted to dispose of hundreds of tonnes of chemical slops in Amsterdam in July 2006.
The ship decided against the cleanup in Amsterdam after being told it would have to pay the clean-up costs.
The waste was given to a local company, Compagnie Tommy, which dumped it near the Ivory Coast commercial capital of Abidjan about a month later. Residents claimed the pollution caused deaths and widespread illness.
The government of Ivory Coast said 16 people died.
During the trial, prosecutor Look Bougert said the company had put “self-interest above people’s health and the environment.”
He said that Trafigura first tried to conceal how dangerous the waste was, then pumped it back on board its tanker and left the Netherlands with hundreds of tonnes of oil residue, contaminated with foul-smelling sulphur mercaptans and toxic hydrogen sulphide.
Instead of paying for specialist disposal, Trafigura “dumped it over the fence” in Abidjan. “Cheap, but with consequences,” Bougert said.
Trafigura’s lawyer Aldo Verbruggen said the charges were based on an unfounded moral judgment.
“Trafigura is a company that takes responsible entrepreneurship very seriously,” he said.
An Ivory Coast appeals court in 2008 dropped criminal charges against Trafigura and a UK judge said that he had “concerns” about media reporting on the case because “experts were quite clear” that the dumping couldn’t have caused the most serious health problems.
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