“THE TOXIC TRUTH”: Toxic waste from the West WAS illegally dumped in IVORY COAST BY TRAFIGURA IN 2006
What are the implications of this Ivorian Toxic Waste Scandal?

“THE TOXIC TRUTH”: Toxic waste from the West WAS illegally dumped in IVORY COAST BY TRAFIGURA IN 2006
What are the implications of this Ivorian Toxic Waste Scandal?

EDHEC BUSINESS SCHOOL
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
EDHEC BUSINESS SCHOOL
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

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Group Members
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Hiba Abidi
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Nour Belhaj Soulami
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Fatma Bouguerra
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Yousra El Alaoui

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Group Members
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Hiba Abidi
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Nour Belhaj Soulami
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Fatma Bouguerra
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Yousra El Alaoui

INTRODUCTION

Over the past three decades, in order to reduce their costs of disposing or recycling the by-products of industries, developed countries have been using poor African nations, especially West African countries, as dumping sites for their hazardous toxic waste materials. Many African nations have been attracted by the promised financial gains from such importations. Unfortunately, the dumping of toxic wastes is responsible for dramatic medical, political, and environmental disaster, whose costs exceeds all the sought benefits.

1. What are the special features of Trafigura?

Trafigura Beheer BV is a Dutch multinational commodity trading company founded in 1993 and registered in the Netherlands. It is the holding company for the Trafigura Group which core trading divisions are Oil and Petroleum Products and also Metals and Minerals. The Group is exclusively owned by over 600 of its senior employees; therein, the senior employees are “motivated to act responsibly and to take a long-term view of the Group’s overall responsibilities”. Trafigura is characterized by a two-tier management structure, consisting of a Board of Directors and a Supervisory Board. The Management Board reports to the Board of Directors and allows the Group to delegate executive operational management within a strong, aligned corporate governance framework.

As a peculiar fact, their headquarters are in Lucerne, their offices are in Amsterdam, the trading company Trafigura Pte Ltd is registered in Singapore and executives are paid in Jersey. According to Marc Guéniat, a trading expert in the Swiss NGO La Déclaration de Berne:

"Its business model is based on an extremely complex structure, scattered in dozens of highly opaque jurisdictions. The firm demonstrates some ability to move in risky environments.”

2. How did Trafigura skirt strong international regulations enabling it not to be held accountable for dumping toxic waste in Africa in front of the UK law, the Dutch court, and the Ivorian authorities?

The overall position of Trafigura on the scandal

Trafigura firmly denies the materials could have killed or seriously sickened anyone. According to its website, the company "strenuously maintains that it did nothing wrong and its staff acted in an appropriate manner". The main strategy of the group has been to dodge its responsibilities and to manage every claim it had to face step by step, with out-of-court settlements alongside of several experts hired to demonstrate that the material dropped by the company is not the cause of the sanitary and health problems harming the local population ever since. Moreover, the complex and opaque structure of the company makes it difficult to identify who exactly is to blame, especially when we take into account the number of subcontractors and other third parties that are involved.

Still, every time a complaint seems to be managed, another one pops out:

* Claims in Côte d’Ivoire

February 12th 2007: settlement agreement with the Ivorian government of $198 million in exchange of the release of three Trafigura executives from prison.
However, the company stressed out that this payment was not considered "damages", and was not admitting liability.

* Claims in the UK

September 2009: settlement in the UK lawsuit of $1,500 for each of the 30,000 claimants of the group action.
But in exchange, the parties released a joint statement that said, among other things, "independent experts are unable to identify a link between exposure to the chemicals released from the slops and deaths, miscarriages, still births, birth defects, loss of visual acuity or other serious and chronic injuries”.

* Claims in the Netherlands

a. First claim in 2008
The Dutch prosecutors accused Trafigura of illegally exporting hazardous waste to Ivory Coast. The allegations against the company are that it breached Dutch export and environmental laws as well as forging official documents. Trafigura rejected these charges.
July 2010: the company is fined €1million. The captain of the Probo Koala is sentenced to 5-year suspended jail term and another Trafigura employee is fined €25,000.

b. Second claim in 2011
Greenpeace filed a complaint with the Court of Appeal in The Hague for more than just the export of hazardous waste.
April 2011: the appeal court ruled that the public prosecution department is not required to prosecute Trafigura for the dumping of the waste in Côte d’Ivoire because the victims are not Dutch residents and the alleged crime was committed outside of the Netherlands.

c. Third claim in 2012
In January 2012, the court decided that Claude Dauphin can be prosecuted for the alleged illegal exports of waste by Trafigura.
November 2012: out-of court settlement of €300,000 compensation and a €67,000 fine in return for the withdrawal of the case against Claude Dauphin.
A new lawsuit will be filed in March 2015 if an out-of-court settlement is not reached. The lawsuit alleges that Trafigura caused “bodily, moral and economic injury caused to the plaintiffs,” and requests that Trafigura pays each claimant 2,500 euros in compensation, as well as cleaning up the waste.
[We did not find any new documents addressing this new lawsuit dating after February 2015.]

3. How did Trafigura handle the scandal, and did it change its corporate social responsibility policies in the aftermath of the scandal?

From the beginning of the scandal, Trafigura rejected any liability for the toxic waste dumping stating that based on their tests, the slop from their ship the “Probo Koala”, could not have caused serious illness and deaths. It kept protesting that the population of Abidjan died as a result of their lifetime exposure to deadly substances and absolutely not because of their waste dumping. It also held responsible “Tommy”, the company that handled the waste asserting that they had an agreement certifying that the waste would be treated and disposed of legally.

The corporation wanted to convince everyone of the veracity of its statements and started suing for libel anyone that said the opposite of what it presented including BBC and Leigh Day & Co. Other companies such as The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and the Dutch newspaper “Volkskrant” received threats of libel action from Trafigura’s lawyers for publishing stories relating to the Abidjan disaster.
Shortly after that, “the Guardian”, a UK newspaper that closely followed the scandal, found a report made by a scientific consulting firm confirming that the toxins dumped in Abidjan were “capable of causing severe human health effects through inhalation and ingestion. These include breathing difficulties, nausea, eye irritation, skin ulceration, unconsciousness and death.” As soon as it heard about the report, Trafigura obtained a “super injunction” against the newspaper that stopped it from publishing its founding nor stating that it has been prohibiting to publish the report.

In October, the Cynthia Corbett Gallery (London) decided to cancel Trafigura from its sponsors for the art prize dedicated to an international exposition presenting the talent of 16 international young artists. However, the disaster did not really affect the business of Trafigura. Indeed, the company managed to raise up to $700m from Asian investors even though it only requested $505m. A Trafigura statement says: “The success of the facility demonstrates the strong relationship we enjoy with the banking community as well as the banks’ confidence in Trafigura’s business model.” It also secured a $520m from European banks and plans to use the deposit to improve its trading operations in emerging markets such as Central America and Africa.

4. How can we explain the inactivity of the international community and how can officials still play ostrich in the face of irrevocable proof?

It is true that serious measures and investigations have been made against this environmental disaster and there was implications of different parties such as the Dutch government, British lawyers and different media around the world along with some Ivorian government interventions but this resulted in Trafigura paying some fines that even injured people didn’t benefit from and not even a recognition from the company nor a statement addressing their regrets for this catastrophe has been made. All that we have heard is a complete denial and a total negligence. Trafigura is not the only party to blame; their behavior is mainly due to the Ivorian government not taking the right actions to prevent such infractions and crimes against humanity. In 2007, Trafigura paid $160 million to the Ivory Coast government in return for the assurance that Ivory Coast would drop all its cases against Trafigura and its employees and would not start any new litigation. But how can we explain the inactivity of the international community and how can officials still play ostrich in the face of irrevocable proof?
This is due to poverty, political and economic instability and the high level of corruption in those regions. “After the toxic waste scandal erupted, Prime Minister Charles Konan Banny suspended the ministers of the port, customs and Abidjan district. But Gbagbo later reinstated them, provoking demonstrations by members of the political opposition.”

5. How can the international community prevent such a medical, political, and environmental disaster in the future?

The negative impacts of this negligence should be analyzed in an objective and impartial way. The existing legal framework should be reaffirmed and interpreted by competent legal authorities, first of all, within the UN system. Certainly, we must continue our struggle to give everyone in the contemporary world a reason to value their own rights and to respect those of the others around the world. At the same time, we must constantly confirm and reaffirm the primacy of the rule of law and the principle that certain acts are so evil that no cause whatsoever can justify their use. But this fight for democracy and social justice must be led in accordance with the law. There should be an objective and impartial interpreter of the most fundamental humanitarian standards to be respected and implemented in everyday life. Our security measures must be firmly founded in law. In defending the rule of law, we must ourselves respect and be bound by law. But we must also be careful not to place whole communities under suspicion and subject them to harassment because of acts committed by a few of their members. Nor must we allow the struggle against this act to become a pretext for the suppression of legitimate opposition or dissent.
Ivory Coast authorities detained the head of Trafigura, Claude Dauphin, and other Trafigura employees. In the UK, the BBC program News night started following the case closely, despite a storm of libel lawsuits threats hitting the UK media. But this is not enough and this is why it led to a total denial from Trafigura.

6. Electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) is currently the largest growing waste stream, what are the implications for West African countries, and how can we make it illegal for developed countries to illegally dump those wastes in the West African shores?

The average computer monitor contains more than five pounds of lead. Computers can also contain mercury and cadmium. As they contain many different materials that are mixed, bolted, screwed, snapped, glued or soldered together responsible recycling requires intensive labor and sophisticated technologies. It is environmentally unsafe for individuals to just throw out electronics gadgets.
Today we are entering a new “cyber-age nightmare that is landing on the shores of developing countries” as instead of closing the “digital divide” between rich and poor countries, a “digital dump” has been created. It has been estimated that 75% of the contents of the containers shipped to Lagos, Nigeria, from Europe and the U.S. are electronic junks that are not economically repairable. This piles of junk pollute the surface water and the lands on which people cultivate, which leads to dramatic health, human rights, and environmental catastrophe in those poor countries.
There is an obvious lack of regulation preventing developed countries from shipping, often illegally, 80% of their e-waste to developing countries. To halt this environmental and human injustice, government in Europe and the U.S., responsible together for 90% of the shipments, need to restrict the use of hazardous materials in computers, require manufacturers to put in place recycling programs and ban hazardous waste exports. Developed countries should comply strictly with the requirements of the Basel Convention, and the Basel Ban Amendment that prohibits all exports of hazardous wastes from developed to developing countries.

Opinion:

Addressing the shores of the Ivory Coast phenomenon is a very complex and challenging task. While condemnation of the toxic waste dump by the international community has been unanimous and unequivocal, efforts to regulate this phenomenon have been marred by differences of approach and competing concerns. A number of key issues remain unresolved and the solution has been further complicated by the implication of several parties and organizations.
The challenge facing the international community is translating the statements and well-elaborated declarations of condemnation of this crime against humanity into concrete measures (legal, political…) that can effectively address the very negative effects and consequences of Trafigura’s irrational activities.
Some regions of the world are suffering from hopeless and forlorn circumstances that became an insult to the conscience of humanity. But we are also confronted with the aftermath of what happened in Abidjan on August 2006 and have happened in many developing countries since then - as a direct or indirect consequence. We must be aware that on August 2006, thousands of human beings, innocent civilians, were brutally deprived of the most fundamental of all human rights - the right to life - by a very premeditated act of negligence which we should consider as a crime against humanity. Thus, serious regulations and tough measures should be taken to prevent this from happening again and to make Trafigura serve as a lesson to all big corporations that only think in terms of profit and always try to take advantage of the financial needs of developing countries, the lack of strict legal regulations and governance and the spread of corruption due to social, economic and political instability in those countries. Human rights must be protected and preserved all over the world with no exception. We all have the right and deserve to live in a healthy environment and no one has the right to prevent anyone from this.

Sources

* “The Toxic Truth” http://www.amnesty.ch/de/themen/wirtschaft-menschenrechte/trafigura/dok/2012/trafigura-muss-fuer-den-giftmuellskandal-gerichtlich-zur-verantwortung-gezogen-werden/zahlen-und-fakten-toxic-waste-dumping-in-the-cote-d2019ivoire-.-1-seite.-auf-englisch * “West Africa's toxic problem” by Daniel Cressey – www.nature.com https://www-nature-com.bibliopam.univ-catholille.fr/news/2011/110120/full/news.2011.35.html * “Ivory Coast clean-up begins” by Richard Van Noorden – www.nature.com https://www-nature-com.bibliopam.univ-catholille.fr/news/2006/060918/full/news060918-3.html * “Approaches to systematic assessment of environmental exposures posed at hazardous waste sites in the developing world: the Toxic Sites Identification Program”
By Bret Ericson, Jack Caravanos, Kevin Chatham-Stephens, Philip Landrigan, Richard Fuller https://link-springer-com.bibliopam.univ-catholille.fr/article/10.1007/s10661-012-2665-2 * Fractionation and ecotoxicological implication of potentially toxic metals in sediments of three urban rivers and the Lagos Lagoon, Nigeria, West Africa
By Aderonke O. Oyeyiola, Christine M. Davidson, Kehinde O. Olayinka, Babajide I. Alo https://link-springer-com.bibliopam.univ-catholille.fr/article/10.1007/s10661-014-3929-9 * Papers prove Trafigura ship dumped toxic waste in Ivory Coast
By David Leigh and Afua Hirsch http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/may/13/trafigura-ivory-coast-documents-toxic-waste * Trafigura lessons have not been learned, report warns
By Fiona Harvey http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/25/trafigura-lessons-toxic-waste-dumping * Trafigura found guilty of exporting toxic waste http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-10735255 * The Toxic Truth about a company called Trafigura, a ship called the Probo Koala, and the dumping of toxic waste in Côte d'Ivoire http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Toxics-reports/The-Toxic-Truth/ * Trafigura http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/detox/trafigura/ * Toxic Waste Dumping in Abidjan
By Thomas MacManus http://www.statecrime.org/testimonyproject/ivorycoast * Trafigura lawsuits (re Côte d’Ivoire) http://business-humanrights.org/en/trafigura-lawsuits-re-c%C3%B4te-d%E2%80%99ivoire * Review of European Community & International Environmental Law
Volume 17, Issue 3, Article first published online: 15 DEC 2008 https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.bibliopam.univ-catholille.fr/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9388.2008.00613.x/pdf * Minton Report http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/10/16/mintonreport.pdf * The global impact of e-waste Addressing the challenge
By International Labour Office Geneva http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_dialogue/@sector/documents/publication/wcms_196105.pdf * The Probo Koala Incident In Abijdan Côte D’Ivoire: A Critique Of The Basel Convention Compliance Mechanism
By Eze, Chukwuka N. Llm (Dalhousie) http://inece.org/conference/8/proceedings/51_Eze.pdf * COTE D'IVOIRE: Company settles over toxic waste scandal
IRIN humanitarian news and analysis from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. (2007, February 14) http://www.irinnews.org/report/70185/cote-d-ivoire-company-settles-over-toxic-waste-scandal * Entreprises responsables : le scandale Trafigura
Machet, L. (2013, February 1). Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.fr/Nos-campagnes/Entreprises-et-droits-humains/Dossiers/Entreprises-responsables-le-scandale-Trafigura-7598?prehome=0 * COTE D'IVOIRE: Toxic Waste Payout
Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series, ISSN 0001-9852, 04/2007, Volume 44, Issue 2, pp. 17287A - 17287B http://utexas.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.light=t&s.q=Toxic+Waste+Africa&s.cmd=setRangeFilter%28PublicationDate%2C2005%3A2015%29 [We were able to get access to the Articles from the UT Austin e-library if you ever want a copy]

* COTE D'IVOIRE: Toxic Waste Scandal
Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series, ISSN 0001-9852, 10/2006, Volume 43, Issue 8, pp. 17073A - 17074A http://utexas.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.light=t&s.q=Toxic+Waste+Africa&s.cmd=setRangeFilter%28PublicationDate%2C2005%3A2015%29 [We were able to get access to the Articles from the UT Austin e-library if you ever want a copy]

* ECONOMIC TRENDS: COTE D'IVOIRE: Toxic Waste Scandal
Africa Research Bulletin : Economic, Financial and Technical Series, ISSN 0001-9852, 10/2006, Volume 43, Issue 8, p. 17073A http://utexas.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.light=t&s.q=Toxic+Waste+Africa&s.cmd=setRangeFilter%28PublicationDate%2C2005%3A2015%29 [We were able to get access to the Articles from the UT Austin e-library if you ever want a copy]

* COTE D'IVOIRE-SWITZERLAND: Toxic Waste Fines
Africa Research Bulletin : Economic, Financial and Technical Series, ISSN 0001-9852, 09/2010, Volume 47, Issue 7, p. 18755B http://utexas.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.light=t&s.q=Toxic+Waste+Africa&s.cmd=setRangeFilter%28PublicationDate%2C2005%3A2015%29 [We were able to get access to the Articles from the UT Austin e-library if you ever want a copy]

* Toxic Waste
By David Pellow
Encyclopedia of Social Problems, 2008, ISBN 9781412963930, pp. 947 – 950 http://utexas.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.light=t&s.q=Toxic+Waste+Africa&s.cmd=setRangeFilter%28PublicationDate%2C2005%3A2015%29 [We were able to get access to the Articles from the UT Austin e-library if you ever want a copy]