Poisoning the air for profits

Trafigura, Vitol and BP exporting dirty diesel to Africa, says Swiss NGO, Public Eye. Traders blend cheap fuel with sulphur levels sometimes hundreds of times over European limits for sale in African countries.

Major European oil companies and commodity traders are exploiting weak fuel standards in African countries to export highly polluting fuels that they could never sell at the pumps in Europe. When the fuel is burned, the sulphur is released into the atmosphere as sulphur dioxide and other compounds that are major contributors to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and asthma. Vehicle emissions are a significant contributor to air pollution, which is why in Europe the maximum sulphur content of diesel has been set at 10 parts per million (ppm) since 2009. In parts of Africa, the legal limit on sulphur in diesel is 5,000 ppm.

The high-sulphur fuels also have a knock-on effect, rapidly destroying emission-reducing technologies in vehicles, according to Rob de Jong, the head of the UNEP transport programme. “So if you buy a vehicle that’s a couple of years old and import it into some of the African countries, the technology in there – sensors and filters – all gets spoilt, and these cars, which are potentially very clean, are destroyed in a couple of tanks, and for the next 20 years will be belching smoke,” he said. “It’s important to understand the tragedy of this,” he added. This in turn increases emissions of fine particulate matter, which can lodge deep in the lungs, causing cancers and other health problems.

Air pollution is estimated to have killed more than 17,500 people in Ghana alone in 2013, costing more than $542m in lost labour income, an estimate that doesn’t even include the cost of treating pollution-related disease.

De Jong said suppliers deliberately blended products towards the high end of the nationally imposed sulphur limit to increase their profits. “There’s not much market anymore for high-sulphur fuels. These are really specific batches made for those specific countries.

The companies involved all deny any wrongdoing and say they comply with the law in the countries in which they operate. Public Eye, however, says the result is “regulatory arbitrage” that allows traders and fuel companies to dump cheap, dirty fuels by blending them into other diesel before export, maximising profits at the expense of Africans’ health.

Trafigura made headlines when a ship it had chartered dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast a decade ago, and the company’s lawyers attempted to gag the press from reporting on a draft report into the incident. Vitol’s sales last year topped $270bn. Its chief executive, Ian Taylor, is a major Conservative donor.

legal vultures

Socialist Banner has previously reported on the Ivory Coast environmental disaster caused by the company Trafigura. Many of the victims managed to gain a share of £30million compensation for the health affects by the illegal dumping of toxic waste.

But it seems that the multimnational were not the only sharks . The lawyers ,Leigh Day and Co, who represented more than 30,000 victims , poor , uneducated citizens of the Cote d' Ivoire have claimed 105 million pounds legal costs including a £50 million success fee , £20 million more than the compensation reward. Not just that but they have failed to ensure that all the claimants received the money . Only 12,250 of them had cashed their cheques.

Civil litigation experts said that the costs were unusually high. "£105m is a very high figure – I don't think I've ever heard a higher one in over 25 years of practice," said David Greene, head of litigation at law firm Edwin Coe.

Criminal Capitalism

A British oil trading giant has agreed to a multimillion-pound payout to settle a huge damages claim from thousands of Africans who fell ill from tonnes of toxic waste dumped illegally in one of the worst pollution incidents in decades.
Trafigura, a London-based company which bills itself as one of the world's largest oil traders, said it was in talks to reach a "global settlement" to the claim by 30,000 people from Ivory Coast, who brought Britain's largest-ever lawsuit after contaminated sludge from a tanker ship was fly-tipped under cover of darkness in August 2006.
The incident caused at least 100,000 residents from the west African country's most populous city, Abidjan, to flood into hospitals and clinics complaining of breathing difficulties and sickness. Investigations by the Ivorian authorities suggested that the deaths of at least 10 people were linked to the waste.

Trafigura struck a series of bargains on the international markets in 2005 and early 2006 to buy cheap and dirty petroleum, called coker gasoline, which the company believed could then be cleaned up at profit of £4m per cargo.Rather than send the oil to a refinery, Trafigura used the Probo Koala, a Panamanian tanker chartered by the company since 2004, as a floating processing plant while it was anchored off Gibraltar. "This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars."
Using an ad hoc process of adding caustic soda and a catalyst to the coker gasoline, the oil was "cleaned" to produce a sellable fuel and a toxic sludge which sank to the bottom of the ship's tanks. "This operation is no longer allowed in the European Union, the United States and Singapore" it is "banned in most countries due to the 'hazardous nature of the waste'", one e-mail warns.

Problems began for Trafigura when it needed to dispose of the slurry. When the Probo Koala arrived in Amsterdam in July 2006 and tried to unload the contaminated slops, allegedly described as "watery cleaning liquids", the process caused a health alert and Trafigura was informed the cost of dealing with its by-product would rise from £17 per cubic metre to £80.Rather than pay the estimated bill of £500,000, Trafigura ordered the waste to be pumped back on to the Probo Koala and the vessel travelled to west Africa where in Ivory Coast fleet of 12 trucks hired by a local waste contractor, Compagnie Tommy, which had only received its operating licence weeks earlier, offloaded the sulphurous sludge from the cargo vessel and deposited the waste at 18 locations around Abidjan .

A United Nations report found that "there seems to be strong prima facie evidence that the reported deaths and adverse health consequences are related to the dumping".

Trafigura repeatedly deployed one of Britain's most aggressive firms of lawyers to dispute reporting on the case by media outlets including the BBC. Trafigura, a privately-owned multinational last year claimed a turnover of $73bn (£44bn). The figure is double the entire GDP of Ivory Coast, where half the population of 21 million live on less than a dollar a day.

Poisoning Africa

In August 2006 a local company hastily fly-tipped truckload after truckload of chemical waste at around 15 locations around the city.

Trafigura had chartered the ship carrying the waste, which unloaded the waste in Ivory Coast, after a failure to agree deals to get it treated in the Netherlands and Nigeria.It said it had contracted a local firm, Tommy, to handle the waste in good faith.

In an out-of-court settlement, Trafigura agreed to pay the Ivorian government around $200m (£100m) in one of the largest ever payments of its kind.

Thousands of victims say they have yet to receive compensation - or say that what they have been given - around $500 (£250) in the main injury category - falls short of the amount they have lost in medical bills and earnings.

Trafigura also disputes whether the chemical slops were the cause of the large number of medical cases.

The United Nations says the dumping of the 500m tonnes of waste led to at least 16 deaths and more than 100,000 other victims needing medical treatment.

Two years on it is still here.

The UN special rapporteur on the dumping of toxic waste, Professor Okechukwu Ibeanu, recently spent four days in the country speaking to officials and victims.

"After almost two years, these sites have still not been decontaminated and continue to threaten the lives and health of tens of thousands of residents, across different social spectrums in Abidjan.The government has informed me that it does not have the technical capacity to clean up and decontaminate the dumpsites in a timelier manner," he said in a statement."This should be an absolute priority."