August 3, 2010 – Shell Argentina, according to it’s own CEO Juan José Aranguren in a recent article published in the Voz del Interior, has accumulated 57 criminal complaints[1] He also admits that the company has amassed over 80 million pesos in fines for its’ code violations, (over US$20 million), but he says that the company’s lawyers are fighting 45 of the violations in local courts.
Under Aranguren’s leadership, Shell has become Argentina’s BP, with endless citations from the national government’s environmental agency, which in 2007 closed Shell’s largest Latin American petroleum refinery for a week at estimated losses of over US$50 million for hundreds of environmental code violations. Under pressure from it’s gasoline stations which began lining up to file lawsuits against the company for failing to deliver supplies, and the mounting tension from accumulating oil tankers off the coast that could not dock at the company’s refinery because it remained closed, the company capitulated and signed a clean up plan estimated at over US$50 million, the equivalent to what it purportedly lost during the forced closure. .
Reminiscent of BP’s many safety oversites in the recent oil spillage in the Gulf of Mexico, Shell had high pressure oil containers that were not even declared to the government, which meant they went un-inspected by government officials. Shell extracted 18 million liters of water per hour from the local river with out a permit, returning the water several degrees warmer, also without permission to do so. The national Environment Secretariat’s inspections also revealed that Shell had struck a deal with the local government to do its own audits, obtaining later, a rubber stamp of approval from local authorities saying all was well at the company’s site.
Years of contamination with no cost or controls ended for the Anglo-Dutch oil giant when in 2006-2007 the Environment Secretariat cracked down on the country’s largest corporate contaminators. Shell, under the leadership of Juan José Aranguren, turned out to be one of the worst performing companies in terms of environmental compliance, despite its’ glossy CSR reports that would suggest otherwise, and numerous gifts the company’s CSR team makes to community schools and soccer teams in the locality of Villa Inflamable, a small residential neighborhood surrounded by tons of toxic waste, at the heart of Shell’s refining operations. “Villa inflammable” literally means “city in flames” a nick name assigned to the residency stemming from common flaring from petroleum refining.
Aranguren admits in the article that since the environment crackdown years, (the Environment Secretary at the time has since resigned) the government has let up on what he calls a persecution. He now claims the government is trying to put him behind bars.
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CEDHA
Center for Human Rights and Environment
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