Amount to 148 billion rubles, which Rosprirodnadzor ordered to pay the damages and the accident at the CHP plant in the Krasnoyarsk region, seemed “to Norilsk Nickel” unfair and the company promised to challenge it in court. Initially, the amount of compensation offered by the company Vladimir Potanin to the state as lease for the catastrophe, oil slick covered hundreds of square kilometers of the Russian North, was fifteen times more modest. Experts believe that the offender is better not to transfer the discussion of indemnities in the legal plane and to think about how to quickly cope with the accident consequences, able in case of delay, lead to a massive environmental disaster.
GMK “Norilsk Nickel” do not absolve themselves of responsibility for the elimination of the disaster, which hit tens of thousands of tons of petroleum products in the local land and water bodies led to the exceeding of maximum permissible concentration of harmful substances in the tens of thousands of times, but considers it a size too exaggerated. The company believes that the calculation of compensation was applied incorrect criteria, which caused biased high penalties. In particular, the state experts took as a basis the so-called “maximum ratio” which is used when an environmental offender too long to eliminate contamination. In this regard, in “Norilsk Nickel” confident that the amount of compensation is distorted and needs to be recalculated.
While its amount of damage caused to nature the company does not name. Less than a month after the accident, the head GMK Vladimir Potanin at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin outlined the cost of liquidation of effects of oil spills in a much more modest sum of 10 billion rubles.
As representatives of “Norilsk Nickel”, the recovery of spilled fuel and recycling of contaminated soil will take at least a year. “Most of that time, the local environment will be exposed to the aggressive action by the remaining on-site hazardous products, which is likely to lead to long lasting destruction of the local natural balance. Environmental tribunals in our country is not sufficiently developed, as a commercial company has a wide experience of dealing at the trial sites. And, in the end, it is possible that the state itself subsequently have to compensate for metallurgists, the money spent on the fight with his puncture,” — said the representative of environmental organizations, who preferred not to give his name in the newspaper.
it is Worth noting that foreign companies do not always pay the full amount imposed by the state and other plaintiffs for the damages to the environment, but were��any cases when such compensation is actually trampled the offender to the bottom of the financial market. So, after the accident of the tanker Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in the spring of 1989, initially to its owners a claim was made in the amount of $5 billion, however, after nearly ten years of litigation it was reduced to $500 million And the disaster at the oil producing platform in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 resulted in a net loss of the owner of the BP obtained in just a few months, more than $16.5 billion in Total over the six years the total cost of the company to eliminate the consequences of accidents exceeded $56 billion.
However, if the “Norilsk Nickel” will put the full amount of the fine, the company is still unlikely to go bankrupt. Last year revenue has doubled and amounted to about $6 billion, which allowed the MMC to pay its shareholders dividends in the amount of $1.2 billion.
According to the analyst CC “Finam” Sergey Drozdova, this year Norilsk Nickel is likely to have to accept the loss of net profit at least 10% from last year’s level. “Companies are not worth arguing with the offered amount of compensation, and rejoice in the fact that the state does impose only penalties. The local area suffered severe damage that cannot always be expressed in monetary terms. In other words, environmental damage is impossible to assess the financial resources that the offending company had to spend on liquidation of consequences of the accident — in any case, the consequences will be much more negative for nature and for life, rather than to the purse of the businessman. Honestly, this year “Norilsk Nickel” of any dividends think it is not necessary”, — said the expert.
