The Luxembourg steel giant ArcelorMittal, the world’s biggest steel company has been shortlisted along with five other candidates for the Public Eye Global Award to be held in Davos, Switzerland, on the 27th January – the opening day of the World Economic Forum.
The company has been selected from over 40 nominees due to its heavily polluting operation in Vanderbijlpark, which is their biggest and most profitable operation in South Africa. The nomination recognises the company’s toxic waste dumping; failure to clean up contamination in neighbourhoods around its steelworks; lobbying against stricter air pollution controls and withholding information from the public that will allow society to better understand the impact of the plant on their health and well-being.
The general public can cast votes at Publiceye until 26th January.
Samson Mokoena of the Vaal Environmental Justice Forum, a community organisation working with people living next to the Vanderbijlpark Plant calls on ArcelorMittal to respect South Africa’s new democracy:
“ArcelorMittal knows what pollution they have caused, but they refuse to release this information to the people who have requested it. This is a travesty of justice in a new South Africa, but Mr Mittal will not be touched because he advises our President on economic policy, thus he has protection for his polluting investment.”
“The problems with ArcelorMittal go far beyond South Africa, with communities as far apart as Kazakhstan and Ohio in the US suffering similar problems with pollution”, added Sunita Dubey, groundWork US Co-ordinator of the Global Action on ArcelorMittal Coalition. “The company’s Kazakh coal mines also have an appalling safety record, with 102 miners dying in accidents since 2004, it has been implicated in unduly influencing Liberian politicians with donations of four wheel drive vehicles and now it wants to build at least two mega-steelmills in India, depriving indigenous people of their ancestral land”.
“With its CEO and largest shareholder, Lakshmi Mittal, being the world’s eighth richest person, you’d think the company would have money to clean up its act, yet in spite of ArcelorMittal receiving ten public loans for a total of more than USD 1.2 billion from the international financial institutions in the last ten years, we’ve yet to see any significant progress”, added Pippa Gallop of CEE Bankwatch Network. “All we’ve heard for the last year is excuses about the financial crisis, but this doesn’t explain why the company has failed to even produce a decent Stakeholder Engagement Plan - costing virtually nothing - as part of its EBRD-financed project in Kazakhstan”.
The Public Eye awards, organised by Greenpeace and the Berne Declaration, are a critical counterpoint to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Organized since 2000, Public Eye reminds corporations with destructive business practices that actions have consequences, presenting ‘name and shame’ awards to the nastiest corporate players of the year and through these awards presents to the world the immoral nexus between corporate power and the political elite.
Contacts:
Sunita Dubey - Coordinator GAAM and groundWork US
+1 617 233 3981 (United States) [email][email protected]
Samson Mokoena – Coordinator of the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance +27 84 291 8510 (South Africa) [email][email protected]
Bobby Peek – Director groundWork, Friends of the Earth, South Africa +27 82 464 1383 [email][email protected] (South Africa) Pippa Gallop - Research Co-ordinator, CEE Bankwatch Network +385 99 755 9787 (Croatia)
[email][email protected]