Lagos missed deadly toxic cargo

19th Sept 2009

Lagos, Nigeria barely escaped being the recipient of toxic waste according to a new series of emails released to explain how Abidjan in Ivory Coast became the dumpsite for more than 400 tonnes of highly toxic petrol waste from a ship, Probo Koala.

Investigators say as many as 95,000 people were forced to seek medical attention, after experiencing the side effects of the toxic waste poisoning, this included chest pains, rashes, sores, scars, nose-bleeding, difficulty in breathing, fatigue, headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea. Thousands had to evacuate their homes within the vicinity of the dumping sites. Since the 2006 dumping more than a dozen people have been reported dead in Abidjan, from the poisonous effects of the waste.

Before berthing in Abidjan, the Probo Koala made desperate efforts to offload its deadly cargo in Lagos. In August 2006 the vessel arrived the shores of Nigeria laden with Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), locally known as “petrol,” for the Nigerian Government.

But apart from the petrol, on board were hundreds of tonnes of highly toxic waste, carried in a separate compartment.

The waste had travelled a long way, and Trafigura was desperate to dispose of it as cheaply as possible.

Serious dollars

The journey of the toxic waste started in December 2005, when Trafigura saw the opportunity to make millions of dollars from buying “bloody cheap” petrol. The petrol was being sold in large quantities by a Mexican refinery, which had been piling up large quantities of it for close to two and a half years. When there was no longer space to store it, the refinery started to sell. The petrol was “bloody cheap” because it contained high levels of sulphur, making it unsuitable for use in automobiles unless it underwent further processing.

In a December 2005 internal Trafigura email, James McNicol told his colleagues “This is as cheap as anyone can imagine and should make serious dollars.” But there was a small problem.

The contaminated petrol needed to be purified. But there were not many sites available for this purification process, due to the toxicity of the waste products (noxious smelling mercaptans and phenols) from the purification process, known in the industry as “caustic washing.” It involved the treatment of the petrol with caustic soda.

“We have already spoken to all the main storage companies, US / Singapore and European terminals no longer allow the use of caustic soda washes since local environmental agencies do not allow disposal of the toxic caustic after treatment,” Trafigura’s Naeem Ahmed told his colleagues by email on December 27, 2005.

Three months later, Trafigura’s Leon Christophilopoulos, sent an email to his colleagues in which he suggested getting, cheaply, a vessel “that is about to be scrapped” and moving it to West Africa “in order to carry out some of the caustic washings over there?” Eventually Trafigura decided to carry out the washing at sea, aboard the Probo Koala, with a plan to discharge the waste at La Skhirra, a tank farm on the Tunisian coast. The washing went on as planned but La Skhirra’s authorities refused to take the waste.

An April 18, 2006 email from Christophilopoulos lamented: “La Skhirra where we were washing/discharging will not let us discharge this material anymore, so the ship we’re using for washing is now converted to floating storage.”

Desperate to dispose of the toxic waste that was sitting in the slop tanks of the Probo Koala, in June Trafigura got in touch with Amsterdam Port Services (APS), asking for help with disposing the waste. The fact that it was the highly toxic product of caustic washing was concealed. On analysis the APS discovered it was highly toxic, and would as a result be expensive to process. It therefore asked for a “payment guarantee” before taking the waste. Trafigura’s reaction to this was not included in the released email exchanges, but what happened next was that the Probo Koala set sail for Lagos, Nigeria; its cargo of death still intact.

Lagos’ near miss

In Lagos Trafigura contacted long time business partners, Daddo Maritime Services (shipping agents) with a de-sloping request.

However, Daddo Maritime Services Limited, is insisting it is an innocent party in this sorry saga. The Managing Director, Mahmud Tukur told NEXT as shipping agents, the duty of Daddo was to serve as intermediaries between ship charterers, ship owners and the government, and that the company had done no wrong in accepting to help the British oil trading firm, Trafigura carry out what was supposed to be a routine ship cleaning exercise. The email response from Daddo, sent on August 10, 2009 communicated Daddo’s acceptance of Trafigura’s de-sloping (cleaning) request. The email however added that the desloping would be put on hold until after the petrol content of the ship was discharged. Mr.Tukur explained that this was for security reasons. According to him, bringing another vessel (to carry out the cleaning) alongside a ship discharging petroleum products would open his company up to allegations of oil bunkering. Daddo also said that as far as it was concerned the slop was nontoxic, and was infact “normal” Mr.Tukur spoke of a “code of conduct” that exists within the shipping business. “If they tell us its slop we assume its slop.” He added that Daddo never failed to obtain “naval clearance” before facilitating desloping operations.

An internal Trafigura email revealed the company’s desire to have Daddo carry out the desloping carried out “preferably offshore Lome [Togo] or as far as possible offshore Nigeria and within International Waters.” In another internal email reference is made to the fact that Daddo’s Operations Manager “has advised that they will only be able to arrange for a barge to de-slop in Nigerian waters.”

Panic

It was somewhere around this time that Trafigura began to panic. Fully aware of the high toxicity of the slop, it feared the fallout of a mishandling - or outright theft of the poisonous slop,in Lagos. David Leigh, investigations editor of the Guardian (United Kingdom),whose newspaper first released the implicating emails, told NEXT in an email that “Trafigura APPARENTLY feared that the waste would then be sold as heating fuel on the Lagos black market... their main anxiety SEEMED TO BE that Trafigura would be held to blame for any repercussions in Nigeria.”

An August 16 Trafigura email speaks of “concerns about doing this in Nigerian waters.” In addition to these fears the company also had to contend with Dutch police who were reportedly demanding for documentation certifying that the waste - which the company had refused to process in Amsterdam - had been properly disposed of.

Trafigura thus cancelled the Lagos plan, and, in an email to its staff in Abidjan, made arrangements for the waste to be disposed in Abidjan.

Merchant of death

The August 2006 disposal of the Probo Koala’s waste was contracted, for $20,000 - (a tiny fraction of what it would have cost had Trafigura settled for a proper disposal in Amsterdam) to ‘Tommy’, an Abidjan-based company owned by a Nigerian, Salomon Ugborugbo.

Settlement

Then suddenly on Tuesday, September 16, the company agreed to pay an undisclosed sum of money as compensation to thousands of Ivorian victims who had taken the company to court in an unprecedented class action suit.

Trafigura’s web site describes it as “the world’s third largest independent oil trader”, with a turnover of US$73 billion in 2008. In 2000 it signed a contract with Jamaica’s state-owned oil company to help lift the crude oil allocated to the country by the Nigerian Government. Trafigura was implicated in the 2005 United Nations oil-for-food scandal in Iraq.

Concerns

When NEXT raised concerns over the ease with which poisonous waste could be brought into and dumped in Nigerian territory, Daddo’s Managing Director was very re-assuring, insisting the situation has changed significantly in the three years since the Probo Koala berthed in Lagos. “The controls are much better in place... times have changed,” Mr. Tukur said. He attributed the changes to the privatisation programme of the Federal Government.

According to Mr. Tukur the African Circle Pollution Management Limited (which in 2004 signed a 25 year waste management agreement with the Nigerian Ports Authority), now has a proper slop processing plant in Lagos, where slop samples are analysed before handling.