“My visit here was unfortunately precipitated by a series of tragic events, most notably on the Ivory Coast where an illegal shipment of European toxic waste caused health and environmental havoc among the population. Such highly toxic waste should have never left the European Union. European and international laws were broken. There is no excuse for it. What happened was not only unethical in the most profound sense of the word, but it was criminal. What is more, I fear that the Probo Koala incident is only the tip of the iceberg.”
– Said by Stavros Dimas, former Environment Commissioner in Estonia near the Probo Koala after the events of Abidjan on September 28, 2006.
In a space of five days between April 10 and 15, 2006, the ship leased by commodities trader Trafigura, the Probo Koala, physically imported toxic waste resulting from the caustic washing of gasoline blendstock on the tanker three times into Maltese territorial waters. During five days of to-ing and fro-ing in and out of the 12-mile Maltese territorial water zone, the ship entered three times into our territorial sea while it was laden with the toxic by-product. Once, it entered the area facing Marsascala and twice stood five miles northeast of the so-called Fairway Buoy.
The caustic washing of the gasoline blendstock, which took 24 hours in all, was initiated just outside the 12-mile area on April 11, 2006 after that the Probo Koala loaded cargo and caustic soda from a Maltese-registered ship, the M/T Seapurha.
During these five days the Maltese authorities were alerted to the presence of the ship. In fact they gave the green light for at least one ship-to-ship (STS) activity with motor tanker Mario C when some materials were loaded onto the Probo Koala and it is legitimate to conclude that the Maltese authority gave their fiat also to a second STS activity. In the meantime a rendezvous with a service vessel called Whirl also occurred opposite St Paul’s Bay.
It is pertinent to ask whether the Maltese authorities were aware of the presence of toxic material in our own seas and whether they took legal advice on whether the Probo Koala observed the rules when it imported the toxic material into our jurisdiction after producing the same by-product a few hours earlier some miles off the “boundary wall”.
There were people, including some whose wage derives directly from the public coffers, who knew of the presence of the toxic material on board the Probo Koala. According to a Dutch prosecutor, Trafigura contacted two entities in Malta to ask whether the toxic waste – the same toxic waste which, along with other waste produced off Gibraltar, was some months later deposited in the Ivory Coast – could be discharged in Malta. One of the entities was, at the time, a government-owned company – Malta Shipyards Ltd. The other entity was a private shipping agency.
Malta Shipyards Ltd refused to take on the toxic waste due to the by-product’s “chemical components”. Did Malta Shipyards Ltd feel the need of alerting the government on that singular (to say the least) request? Did it inform the competent local authority on toxic waste transfrontier shipment (Malta Environment and Planning Authority) on what was going on?
The government now needs to provide answers and facts. As I stressed in my repeated interventions on the subject, Malta, as the originator of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and as a neutral country actively pursuing peace, must be on the forefront of fair practices worldwide.
Not to mention the issues of safety in our territorial waters.
The Prime Minister, while replying to a Parliamentary Question last year (PQ 13026), said that the competent authority never received any allegations that Malta might be used as a hub for chemical dumping in West Africa and that there has never been any request for transportation of toxic waste to West Africa.
He said that that the competent authority was continuously monitoring the situation and if any indication of abuse arose, the authority would immediately inform the police.
The facts that I provided in the past weeks are much more than a simple indication. It’s now time for the authorities to wake up and act.
On July 23, 2010 a Dutch court fined commodities trader Trafigura €1 million for illegally exporting toxic waste to Ivory Coast which ended up being dumped in the open air. The case is subject to an appeal.
Dr Bonnici is Opposition Spokesman for Youth and Culture and a member of the Foreign and European Affairs Parliamentary Committee.