Helter-Smelter
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
An Indian company is bidding to buy Asarco, the copper company that polluted El Paso for decades, but environmentalists want to halt the deal.
Last weekend an Indian billionaire successfully bid in bankruptcy court for Asarco. But five environmental groups, including Sierra Club and Austin’s Public Citizen fired off a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey today asking the Department of Justice to block the sale. They say the Indian company has a history of polluting.
Sterlite Industries, a subsidiary of the Vedanta Group, is owned by billionaire Anil Agarwal who will pay $2.6 billion for the American Smelting and Refining Company. The copper mining company, which operated in the United States for more than 100 years, left a legacy of polluted sites across the country, including El Paso. In a 2004 Observer story, Jake Bernstein described the toxic levels of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals spewed by an Asarco smelter into El Paso neighborhoods.
The El Paso copper smelter was finally shuttered in 2002. Since then Asarco — which was bought by the Mexican mining conglomerate Grupo Mexico — has descended into one of the biggest environmental bankruptcy cases in U.S. history. Now Grupo hopes to fend off creditors and retain control of Asarco both in bankruptcy court in Corpus Christi and in a civil court case in Brownsville. Both cases should be decided by mid-June.
But Grupo won’t be hosting any Earth Day events any time soon: Grupo could face up to $1 billion in costs to clean up legacy pollution — Superfund sites, abestos claims and various remediations including Asarco’s El Paso Smelter. But it remains unclear if the company will ever have to pay the bill.
The recent successful bid by Sterlite does not bode well for Grupo Mexico. The company told Reuters that the bidding process was unfair and that the company would fight to keep control of Asarco. The deal is still subject to the approval of Bankruptcy Judge Richard Schmidt in Corpus Christi.
On the environmental front, Sierra Club and four other groups: Public Citizen, Environmental Integrity Project, Galveston Houston Association for Smog Prevention and the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development of Austin say that Vedanta Group, which owns Sterlite is an environmental “bad actor.”
In a backgrounder on the mining conglomerate, the groups alleged that Vedanta has caused major water contamination in Zambia and India. They also cited several international newspaper reports where the company was criticized for human rights abuses and unsafe mining operations.
The next two weeks should offer some fascinating twists and turns in one of the biggest and most complicated environmental liability cases in U.S. history. Unfortunately, the losers in this battle of the mining billionaires will probably be the hundreds of thousands of American citizens across the nation waiting for a clean environment.
