Trafigura, Carter-Ruck and the power of the blogosphere
On Monday 12 October a very strange article appeared on the front page of the Guardian. Apparently the paper had been prevented by a legal injunction from reporting a question that was going to be asked in the House of Commons later that week. In addition, not only was the paper not allowed to report on the question, but was also not allowed to report on why it wasn’t allowed to report. As the article so eloquently put it:
Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.
What the paper was able to say, however, was that it was the legal firm Carter-Ruck that had obtained the legal order. Carter-Ruck are notorious for defending large corporate clients with a dubious track record. In many cases they have been successful, but this time it wasn’t to be.
Why not? Well, the power of the social web.
As soon as I saw the article, I thought ‘I wonder if this has to do with that company that dumped that toxic waste in the Ivory Coast a few years back?’ And how was I going to find out? Well, I logged into Twitter, of course.
At least half the people in my Twitter stream were talking about it. And of course the case was about Trafigura.
You can read the full details about the case on Wikipedia, but in short, in 2006, the British oil trading firm Trafigura, dumped 500 tonnes of toxic waste – a mix of petrol, caustic soda and hydrogen sulfide – all around Abidjan, the capital city of the Ivory Coast, causing 17 people to die and causing serious injury to over 30,000 people. The waste was so strong smelling, that apperantly, had it been dumped in Central London, people would have been able to smell it outside of the M25.
Trafigura had created the waste when cleaning low-quality petrol using a method called caustic washing. The clean petrol was sold off, reportedly for a profit of $19 million, but the company thought it was too expensive to pay a Dutch company to properly clean the waste. Instead the tanker was sent from Rotterdam to the Ivory Coast, where Trafigura paid an unqualified local contractor to dump the waste all around the city.
All this was reported by Newsnight back in May. Carter-Ruck then immediately sued the programme on behalf of Trafigura. Finally, last month, the Guardian was able to prove Trafigura’s involvement by publishing a raft of internal emails discussing the case.
Anyway, back to this week. As soon as the story broke, the blogoshpere was full of it. By 9am, both #trafigura and #carter-ruck where top trending topics on Twitter, links to more blog posts than you could shake a stick at were passed around and the reports that the Guardian was not allowed to publish were up on Wikileaks.
The gagging order had totally turned on itself. The whole world was talking about it. As one commentator said (can’t remember where I saw it): ‘It was the equivalent of a public relations own-goal’.
So what happened? Well, soon enough the mainstream press (well, the Spectator) had also started reporting on the story, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat Leader had tweeted about it and MPs were up in arms.
And it went on and on and on. There’s a really good complete account, from throughout the day, of what happened on the Online Journalism Blog.
By mid-day the gag was lifted and the Guardian was able to report what the original question tabled by Labour MP Paul Farrelly was:
“To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.”
So, a happy ending? Yes, but perhaps no. As the Online Journalism Blog reports, blogger Alan Brookland points out the following:
However, before everyone gets too self-congratulatory, does any of this brief flirtation with online interest ever actually change anything? True, right now, lots of people who had probably never even heard of Trifigura will now be reading up on the dumping story, but, come tomorrow or next week, how many will still remember much about it? The bloggers will chalk up a victory and in this case the gagging order was actually lifted, but this is still an on-going case and nothing will have actually changed.
And I guess what we need to remember is that what caused the storm this time was the gagging, not the original event.
I have to ask – where were the bloggers when Newsnight originally reported the dumping story back in May?
Originally published on eatanicecream.com
Update: Shouldn’t have bothered writing this post. I should’ve just linked to this.
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