The large and breathtakingly arrogant British oil trading firm called Trafigura (you know, oil trading, the industry who jacks the price of heating oil in the winter and gasoline in the summer and brought us all $150/barrel oil last year, those nice guys-- think Enron, Jr.) in the last couple of days had to stop threatening libel lawsuits against the media and announce they'd agreed to pay out $100 million pounds to settle injury suits brought by over 30,000 people of Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast in Africa, where the company had arranged to dispose of thousands of gallons of sludge so toxic it's against Dutch law to remove it from the European Union (the Dutch are working on filing criminal charges now).
There are stories here, here, and here which describe the situation. Basically, the company figured out they could make a couple of million in profit by buying bad (and useless) high-sulfur gasoline from the Mexican government's oil refinery. They just had to clean it. The way they chose to do that was actually illegal-- they dumped caustic soda and some other chemicals into an oil tanker full of the Mexican stuff, sold off the resulting marginally clean gasoline then attempted to dispose of the rest as if it were just routine tanker sludge. When they couldn't get rid of it that way, they looked around for alternatives, and finally paid some guy from the Ivory Coast to unload it into his fleet of tanker trucks, and his drivers then proceeded to drive it around the Ivorian capital and dump it anywhere they could.
Unfortunately, dozens of people died, more dozens were grievously injured, and thousands more had bizarre and serious reactions. The dumper is in prison for twenty years for manslaughter, but until this week, the company, though they had already paid out $100 million bucks to settle the wrongful deaths suits, fought through the courts and aggressive PR to keep the lid on in Europe and the UK. They were protecting their "good name"! Finally, this week they had to relent, when they announced they were paying another $100 million to the 31,000 injured parties.
This is the most arrogant and disgusting, and I'm sorry, but clearly racist, behavior. They're still claiming the charges against them are trumped up and non-scientific. They should all be in jail! This is the white man stooping down and taking a huge shit on Africa and the Third World! Because they were making so much profit turning cokers naptha into gasoline! Which they probably sold in Africa. This is smaller, but similar to Bhopal, where an American company, Union Carbide (since bought by Dow), accidentally released cyanide gas that killed somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000 people in one night and over the course of the next 10 years, and are still fighting off lawsuits and denying liability.
This is capitalism's face of avaricious greed. Everyone in that company should be forced to move to Abidjan to work around the clock to clean up the mess. Everyone in the company, except the sales staff, who should spend the same amount of time in the Ivorian Prison system. All the sales staff except the head of sales, and the president and CEO and maybe the board of directors of the company, who should be hung by an Ivorian hangman. One after the other. In a public square. Except they probably don't even have capital punishment in the Ivory Coast. Capital punishment is only done in civilized societies. Like ours.
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