EXPLOITATION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE SEA

Mr. Claude Dauphin, held in the Ivory Coast under investigation of toxic discharges from the Probo Koala, is a leader of Trafigura (see preceding notice). He is known as a follower of Marc Rich (see article “The Rich Boys” in Business Week’s July 18, 2005 edition and the Robin des Bois’s press release “My pollueur is Rich” from January 29, 2003). He began his international career in London as a broker of oil products. Under his name, he developed the GDE—Guy Dauphin Environment—a familial society for the recycling of metals and batteries. The society’s historic site is based near Caen, Normandy, and its parent company is the Ecore group.

Claude Dauphin, principal shareholder of Guy Dauphin Environment, which is known in France and abroad as a booming development in the field of recycling but poorly controlled in regards to environmental issues, would also be one of the leaders of the Trafigura holding company. Trafigura is the holding company under Dutch law which chartered the Probo Koala (Panamanian flag, Greek shipowner), the ship responsible for the pollution of the Ivory Coast. Claude Dauphin was, in addition, the creator of a London society for the brokerage of oil products and wastes, Ecore, today owned by Trafigura. Once again it is demonstrated that recycling procedures and dealing of oil waste in this specific case are absolutely not controlled by the European states.

Subject : Ivory Coast/Toxic wastes

The belated and muddled accounts of multinational Trafigura, broker of oil products whose parent company is based in the Netherlands, intend to conceal the terrible truth. Trafigura delivered the non complying waste to the operator Amsterdam Port Services (APS), refused to pay the treatment surcharge, and did not respect the European Parliament and Counsel’s directive on port facilities receiving ship-generated wastes and cargo residues. With the complicity of environmental authorities at the Amsterdam port, the ship unloaded and reloaded its wastes, and continued to the Estonian port of Paldiski, where the residues were still not discharged. The logistics coordinator from Trafigura selected the Abidjan port as the final receptacle of these wastes. Certainly Abidjan’s financial conditions for reception are markedly more advantageous than those of Amsterdam, but elimination conditions there are also distinctly inferior, especially when cleaning and cargo residues contain thiol, hydrogen sulfide, and sodium hydroxide.

We hope that so far as it is technically possible and to avoid all further sanitary problems and concerns amongst the Abidjan populations, the wastes spread over more than 10 sites around the capital of the Ivory Coast one month ago will be aggregated, condensed, packaged, and sent to Europe for treatment. It is simply disgraceful that no initiative to this effect has yet been formulated or undertaken by ship owners, charterers, or, in their absence, European political authorities. Beyond the controversy of the potential complicities in the Ivory Coast, it is evident that the volition and the act of spreading these toxic wastes in a country in which the elimination procedures are nearly nonexistent constitute a crime.

1.) On the applicable law concerning cargo residues or ship-generated waste:

The cargo residues pumped in Abidjan on August 19 and 20th from the tanks of the Probo Koala are not beholden to the Basel Convention, which theoretically obliges countries exporting waste and the countries importing them to establish a bilateral dossier giving evidence that the first does not have adequate techniques of treating these wastes and that the second has adequate available techniques or still that the exported waste are beneficially useful to the importing country. The Basel Convention excludes ship-generated waste from its jurisdiction in its founding text.

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A sacred union made Port 2000, the plural left and the singular right with the assistance of the President of the Republic – who proclaimed in September of 1995 that Port 2000 is “a project of national economic importance and major political interest” – and to the communist Minister of Transportation, the inexhaustible Mr. Gayssot who will not cease to carry budgetary additions on each of his visits to Porte Océane. Only SOS Estuaire and Robin des Bois have grappled with this machine.

The full extent of the risks
Port 2000 will manipulate and stockpile all classes of hazardous materials. The CIM area encompasses 100 meters in the back of the container parks. CIM (Industrial and Maritime Company) has the capacity to stock 5 million tons of oil and is subject to the Seveso directive. To reduce the domino effect between the two installations, in case of industrial accidents, it did not bode well during the initial stages of the project. Then the idea for a slope – measuring 1 to 2 meters long, 60 meters wide at the base, and 17 meters high – was introduced. Experts and third-experts considered it the surest solution concerning the reduction of missile effects and the confinement of toxic and thermal flows. This option would have reduced the availability of container parks by 20%; consequently, this precaution was deemed “unacceptable in regards to the public investment made in other respects to the maritime infrastructure.” The work was surrendered for the profit from two container stacks separated by a corridor measuring 46 meters and functioning as an internal passageway. It was advised that these screen walls be composed of four levels of containers; but the final product consists of only three containers. The structure’s ability to prevent risks is weakened. Example: “Unlike a wall consisting of four containers, a wall of merely three containers does not allow for the containment of zone Z1 (lethal, NDLR) resulting in the escape of chlorinate.” CIM, under pressure from DRIRE (Regional office of Industry, Research, and Environment), dismantled a holding tank of 150,000 tons encrusted in the area of Port 2000. In exchange, CIM negotiated with Port Autonome the prolongation of the concession that expires in 2019.