87
the toxic truth
chapter 7
directly pertains to waste produced through processes related to petroleum – its core business.
Diomande Adama, former employee of Hotel Sofitel in Paris, who exposed how Trafigura paid for the General Manager and others of the Port of Abidjan to stay at the hotel in May 2006. © Greenpeace/Pieter Boer
The choice of Tommy Having decided to offload waste in Abidjan that it knew was dangerous, and which should not have left Europe, far from taking all possible steps to ensure its safe disposal, Trafigura contracted a newly licensed company to deal with it. The circumstances surrounding the decision to contract Compagnie Tommy are highly questionable. As described in Chapter 4, a more experienced company was known to Trafigura: Ivoirienne des Techniques d’energie (ITE). But on 17 August 2006, Trafigura’s subsidiary, Puma, was apparently unwilling to wait a matter of 30 minutes to talk to ITE. Instead, Tommy was contracted within a matter of 24 hours. No explanation has been provided as to why Trafigura opted for an unproven, newly licensed company to dispose of waste that it was, by this time, well aware was dangerous and needed proper treatment and disposal. When Trafigura’s Chairman, Claude Dauphin, was asked about the choice of Tommy during his police interview in Abidjan, he was not able to give an answer:
““
Question to the accused: Why did you take the risk of finding a company in two days to treat these products in Abidjan when no information was available about the prices charged in this locality and when the Amsterdam contract with APS had been ended for reasons to do with price? Reply: I have asked myself the same question.
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The handwritten letter supplied by Compagnie Tommy, which constitutes the contract with Trafigura, should, on its own, have raised questions about the capacity and experience of the company. First, Tommy’s
Trafigura’s relationship with the Port of Abidjan According to Trafigura, the company and its subsidiaries are major investors in Abidjan and the port. Documents obtained by Greenpeace in 2010 reveal that the General Manager of the port had stayed in Paris in a luxury hotel at the expense of Trafigura at the end of May 2006, just a few months before the waste was dumped in Abidjan and before the port authorities approved a crucial extension of Compagnie Tommy’s licence on 9 August.378 The hotel invoices were passed to Greenpeace by an Ivorian exemployee of Hotel Sofitel in Paris who stated that he had quit his job in 2010 in order to release the information. In early 2011, Greenpeace asked Trafigura to comment on the company’s relationship with the General Manager of the port.379 Trafigura did not to respond to the information presented,380 but has publicly stated that the allegation of impropriety is “absurd” and that, given its relationship with the port, “it is inevitable that there are business meetings with the relevant authorities.” The company has also stated on its website that if “Trafigura had been planning in May to discharge the slops in Abidjan then why would the company have gone to the substantial cost and effort of sending the Probo Koala into Amsterdam in July?” It is not clear how “substantial” the costs involved were in sending the Probo Koala to Amsterdam, given it was en route to nearby Estonia. Amnesty International and Greenpeace have asked Trafigura to comment on the reason for the Paris meeting, and to disclose any payments made directly to, or as expenses for, public officials in Abidjan. The company did not respond.