The Dominican government filed suit on Friday, 24 March at the US District Court of Northern Virginia against AES Corporation. The Dominican government is charging the US corporation for the deposit of thousands of tons of coal ash from an AES power plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico, on the shores of the Dominican Republic in 2003 and 2004. The case revolves around 30,000 tons of ash that were dumped in Manzanillo, in northwestern Monte Cristi province, in late 2003 and another at least 27,000 tons that in early 2004 were dumped on the northern shore of Samana Bay, according to the lawyers carrying the case. The material came from coal-fired generation facilities in Guayama, Puerto Rico. The Ministry of Environment is suing AES for US$80 million in damages to the environment, the economy and the welfare of the population. The law offices of Bart S. Fisher are representing the Dominican government.
The suit accuses several top ranking AES officials of conspiring to deposit the fly ash illegally around other sites in the Caribbean, including Haiti, the Cayman Islands and the Dominican Republic. The suit explains that the material was shipped to the DR because proper and lawful disposal of the material in a landfill within the US would have cost about US$25 per ton. “AES sought to reduce this cost as much as possible, perhaps to as little as US$4 a ton, by using nearby countries whose environmental and regulatory restrictions it might evade,” reports the Ministry of Environment.
“To carry this plan into effect, it created a series of buffer or masking companies, which in turn it directed to contract with yet other firms, so as to distance itself from responsibility for its actions,” the lawyers retained by the Ministry of Environment report. They state that the company “incorporated these largest assetless companies in the Cayman Islands and other off-shore jurisdictions.”
The legal counsel of the Ministry of Environment claim that the suit filed on Friday seeks to show that this scheme was a “fraudulent conspiracy”. “The suit will show that contractors of AES, using AES resources, resorted to bribes and attempted bribes, threats of murder and physical assault to silence or preempt opposition to the arrival of the ash,” explain the lawyers. “The Dominican Republic would have become the repository of rising piles of ash in different places had AES not been stopped by the determined efforts of an aroused population,” state the lawyers.
See http://dr1.com/news/2006/032706_AESsuit.pdf