This afternoon, the President (Antoine Ble) of the Tribunal of First Instance in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, gave his judgment that the compensation fund for the 30,000 claimants who alleged they were victims of the 2006 toxic waste dumping in Abidjan from the Trafigura ship, the Probo Koala should remain in the client account of their lawyers, Leigh Day & Co. The Court specifically decided that the money should not be transferred to the account of Claude Gohourou, who had claimed that his association, the National Coordination of Toxic Waste Victims of Cote d’Ivoire (CNVDT-CI) represented all 30,000 Claimants and should have received the money on their behalf.
The decision of the Judge has come as an enormous relief to the claimants and to their legal team who between them had battled for three years to obtain the compensation.
Martyn Day, senior partner at Leigh Day said:-
‘I could not be more pleased. This application by Mr Gohourou was the most audacious attempt to take the claimants' money. I am delighted the Court has seen through this and have acted so strongly in the interests of the claimants. Our clients will be partying in the streets of Abidjan tonight and we can at last get on with the process of paying them all out their hard fought compensation.'
The decision flies in the face of the application by Mr Claude Gohourou and his association to have the money transferred to his account. The freezing order was put in place on 22 October 2009. The Judge’s decision today was that the association did not even have legal capacity to make the application to transfer the money.
The compensation money remains temporarily frozen whilst Leigh Day establishes to the Judge's satisfaction that they have a specific mandate from their clients to distribute the funds to the Claimants - but it is not anticipated this will prove a significant hurdle. Leigh Day hope to recommence the distribution process of the compensation as soon as possible.
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