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Thursday, November 05, 2009

Trafigura suppresses scientific lecture. Allegedly

The Nederlands Foresnic Institute (NFI) did some work on the Trafigura Probo Koala toxic waste dump in Abidjan 2006. In Beirut, March 17-18, 2009 the director of NFI gave a presentation about environmental crime at a UNDP-POGAR conference in Beirut, and gave Trafigura's action as an example of such a crime.

According to this (francophone) site , record of his presentation was removed from the conference site. The NFI man, whose name, it has to be said, is Perry C Quak, is indeed on the conference programme, but his presentation does not appear on the list of conference documents.

This site has a copy of the NFI power point presentation (as .pdf).
If it gets taken down, I have a copy on my machine.

Relevant slide

Hundreds of tons of highly toxic waste…
… and the consequences:
- 17 dead
- 26,000 injured
- huge damage
to environment

“Probo Koala”
Judicial consequences, 2 years later:
– Ivorian CEO: 20 years of imprisonment
– Ivorian advisor: 5 years of imprisonment
– Dutch transporters: 152,000,000 dollar fine
And why did the offenders do it?
– high profits: unlawful dumping of toxic waste saves a lot of money

He is calling for a specialised Functional Public Prosecutor's office to deal with environmental crime.

If it is true that Trafigura forced a UNDP conference to delete reference to this presentation, it shows how desperate they are to expunge any reference to their actions.

Goebbels would have been impressed.

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