Peru court order US mining firm to pay $163 million
Peru court order US mining firm to pay $163 million
AFP
August 3, 2014, 4:02 am
Lima (AFP) - American mining concern Doe Run must pay $163 million for failing to take sufficient environmental measures at its site in La Oraya, Peru's high court announced Saturday.
One of the world's largest producers of lead, Doe Run at the Peru site also produces copper and other metals that create large amounts of polluting byproducts.
Its contract, which Peru says the company failed to honor, requires that it take stringent preventive measures to safeguard the environment in the area.
Peru sued the company after it failed to build a treatment plant to reduce the emissions, and the court has ruled in its favor, officials announced.
A report last year by the International Federation for Human Rights found that "the air been contaminated by emissions of lead and other heavy metals spewed from the chimneys of the refinery," run by Doe Run and that the water and soil also had been contaminated.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/business/world/a/24617907/
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The Doe Run company has been a vicious threat to the people in the area, owned by US citizen,
Ira Rennert:
Poisoned city fights to save its children
Families in a Peruvian valley choked by toxic gas from a smelter are taking on a US metals giant
Hugh O'Shaughnessy in La Oroya, Peru
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer
Children wearing masks play near the towering chimneys
of Peru's La Oroya refinery and metals processing
plant. Photograph: Reuters
At an altitude of 13,000ft the Andean air is clear. A plume of white smoke rises from the chimney at the La Oroya smelter, hard at work refining arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium and copper. But today the company is not discharging any gases over this city in central Peru. 'It's a nice day, so the company won't be letting off any gases,' says Hugo Villa, a neurologist at the local hospital. 'They keep the worst emissions to overcast days or after dark.'
When the gases are released, they make this one of the most polluted places on the planet, with La Oroya ranking alongside Chernobyl for environmental devastation, according to a US think-tank, the Blacksmith Institute.
The company is a US corporation, Renco Doe Run. The gases are the product from the main smelter a mile or two down the valley. The high mountains around keep out the cleansing winds, meaning that airborne metals are concentrated in the valley. Neither humans nor nature can escape the company's outpourings of poisons. And, despite evidence that gases have been behind the premature deaths of workers and residents young and old, the business-oriented, pro-US government of President Alan Garcia is too afraid of foreign investors to do anything about it.
Now, however, the townspeople, once muted by their worries about losing their jobs with the valley's biggest employer, are turning their attention towards Ira Rennert, Renco's proprietor.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/12/environment.pollution
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Ira Rennert's Hamptons home
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