Tag Archives: carter-ruck

BBC slapped with new injunction as Trafigura and Carter Ruck come back for more

7:13pm Tue December 15th

It seems waste dumping bastards oil company Trafigura and their libel lawyers Carter Ruck didn’t learn very much from their comprehensive owning at the hands of the blogosphere in October. The New Statesman is reporting that the video ‘Dirty Tricks and Toxic Waste in the Ivory Coast’ has been removed from the BBC’s website after they after legal threats (it was here):

You can view the original report over at Wikileaks or a Newsnight report on the super injunction shitstorm below:

What to Trafigura seek to achieve by attempting vainly to suppress something that is already in the public domain?!

This is Streisand Effect 101.

Hat tip: Iain Dale

Trafigura YouTube video: we injuncted Guardian because Minton Report was "a work in progress"

3:56pm Sat October 17th

12 comments

Having realised that bringing a whole load of Orwell to the party doesn’t work, Trafigura have bypassed old media and hit YouTube with an injunction the following interview with director Pierre Lorinet:

In the interview – possibly conducted with staffer from PR spinners Bell Pottinger – Lorinet tries to explain away the Minton Report and the injunction (partial transcript):

Most of you will have heard about the incident in the Ivory Coast where the discharge of waste material, or slops, was done and created an incident. There’s been a lot of reporting about this, a lot of it misleading, unfortunately. More recently we’ve been in the media with regards to an injunction of a so-called Minton Report.
Fundamentally the Minton Report was a draft, it was a work in progress. And it was immediately superseded by another report which looked at the actual material because the Minton report was an anlysis of possible, it was desktop, there was no fundamental analysis. It was superseded very quickly by the NFI [Netherlands Forensic Institute] Report, which basically demonstrated the [toxic waste] could not have caused what’s been alleged. And in particular the NFI report formed the basis, the authoritative analysis for both the claimants and ourselves within the UK class action.
Why did you take out the injunction?
There’s been a lot of misreporting. The Minton Report being a work in progress and having been superseded it was likely, unfortunately, to be misreported and that wouldn’t help the overall debate. That’s why we took the injunction.
Your critics will say you were trying to gag a proper debate in parliament.
That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It was never designed for that purpose. All it was designed to do was to stop some of the media to report in a misleading fashion on the Minton report. It was never intended to stop debate in parliament or parliamentary questions on those issues.

Note that Lorinet doesn’t contest the fact that the company dumped a load of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, which made a load of people ill. Trafigura executives knew the waste was dangerous and the Guardian has published internal company emails in which traders talk of making “serious dollars” from paying someone else to take away their “shit”.

So where is this NFI report then?

Carter-Ruck react with new website and PR offensive

2:15pm Wed October 14th

8 comments

After a difficult 48 hours which saw the law firm under assault from the blogosphere, politicians and the media, Carter-Ruck is to undertake a PR charm offensive with redeveloped online content and endorsements from “brand ambassadors”.

The campaign has enlisted the support of celebrity Labour blogger Derek Draper. “The combination of litigiousness and a cack-handed approach to all things online make Derek the ideal representative for the Carter-Ruck brand”, said Senior Partner Andrew Stephenson*:

“I wish I’d used them now” – Derek Draper

Click the image below to enlarge:

Here at Carter Ruck we pride ourselves on making sure what you want kept private stays that way – unless you want to make it known across a range of online and social media!
Yes, taking on our services means a guaranteed social media presence, going viral within minutes and an appearance on Paul Staines’ popular “blog”, Guide Fawkes.
With an exclusive client list ranging from the rich to the really, really rich, you can be confident whether you have dumped, toxic waste, or bodies, that we can have a hashtag and aggressive media coverage by the end of the day!

Thanks to “the ayatollah” for the above exclusive preview of the Carter-Ruck site. Some say he was raised in the dark by miners and he sees the world in smells. Some say he doesnt like toffee. You can follow him here.

*Yeah, yeah. It’s satire.

Channel 4 News reports on Guardian gagging order

11:47pm Tue October 13th

1 comment

With the reporting ban lifted, the Guardian/blogosphere vs Trafigura/Carter-Ruck maelstrom of the last 24 hours got a decent look in on Channel 4 News earlier this evening. There’s even a cameo from the blogosphere’s celebrity libertarian:

Scrapbook reckons there’s something a bit Phil Spector about Alan Rusbridger.

Perhaps it’s the glasses?

How the blogosphere vs Trafigura and Carter-Ruck unfolded

2:06pm Tue October 13th

7 comments

Trafigura and Carter Ruck trending on Twitter

At 8:30pm last night, an article entitled Guardian gagged from reporting parliament appeared on the newspaper’s website. Twelve hours later, Trafigura – a large but inconspicuous trader in oil and base metals – was on the lips of bloggers and tweeters everywhere along with Carter Ruck, their libel lawyers.

Just before 10pm Guido reproduces the parliamentary question the Guardian had been blocked from printing, inviting Carter-Ruck to sue him in Nevis, where his blog is incorporated.
With “British Press Banned From Reporting Parliament. Seriously“, The Spectator becomes the first mainstream media outlet to print the question.
The other big-boy right wing bloggers pile in, including Tory Bear with characteristic humour.
Next Left’s brilliantly sarcastic post was presciently titled Carter-Ruck vs. the blogosphere.
Scrapbook uncovered the select committee evidence that alerted Paul Farrelly, the MP who tabled the ‘unreportable question’, to Trafigura.

The story took off overnight on Twitter, thanks largely to a gargantuan effort by Morus, who deputises for Mike Smithson at Political Betting.

While mainstream online news outlets wouldn’t touch the story, Alan Rusbridger tweeted at 9:49 am that the Guardian planned to challenge the Carter-Ruck in the High Court today.
Left Foot Forward become the first site to pull together a cohesive analyisis and early narrative of the story.
Mr Eugenides highlights the debacle as an example of the Streisland effect, where attempts to stifle a story backfire completely by generating yet more adverse publicity.
Urgent questions are table by the Liberal Democrats in Parliament.
At 12:53 Rusbridger announces – again via Twitter – that Carter-Ruck have backed down.

“One day these highly-remunerated libel lawyers are going to wake up and realise that they aren’t being paid in guineas any more and that, thanks to this thing called the Interwebs, they can’t shut down freedom of speech the way they used to in the old days.” – Mr Eugenides

The BBC, Channel 4 New et al should pick this up now.

This can’t happen again.

UPDATE: A few post-mortems around but The Daily Quail’s Carter-Ruck school of viral marketing is definitely the funniest.

Trafigura: "the biggest toxic dumping scandal of the 21st century"

9:15am Tue October 13th

2 comments

Through their attempts to gag the reporting of parliament, Trafigura (turnover $73bn) have given a new lease of lease of life to the following story (click for video):

“A smaller company might by now be drowning in scandal” – Newsnight

To top things off the document they may have been attempting to suppress – the report on waste dumping by Minton, Treharne and Davies - is now on Wikileaks and #Trafigura is now trending on Twitter.

Would love to be a fly on the wall when whoever developed this PR/legal strategy is explaining why it backfired so completely.

Uncorrected Select Committee evidence on Trafigura and Carter Ruck

2:03am Tue October 13th

10 comments

Further to the breaking story of a cack-handed attempt to gag reporting of parliament, below is an excerpt from an uncorrected transcript of oral evidence given by Mark Stephens to the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee. Stephens is a media lawyer and partner in Finer Stephens Innocent LLP:

Mark Stephens: I would say removing the right to sue is really what it is about. We are seeing at the moment a real problem with a company called Trafigura who have retained lawyers to attack Green Peace [sic] International predominantly, but also media organisations who are reporting about the alleged toxic dumping in Africa of waste.
They are doing this in a number of ways. Letters are being sent; they are suing the lawyers, Leigh Day, who are taking claims; I understand that Leigh Day are representing 16 people who died, 100,000 people who needed medical attention, including miscarriages, respiratory problems and organ failure, and there is a class of about 30,000 Ivorians who have suffered as a result of this toxic dump. It seems to me that it is wholly inappropriate for a very wealthy company to try and chill down discussion about toxic dumping through this kind of aggressive behaviour. For example, there are threats to individuals at Green Peace International; and there are also threats, for example, to the BBC. If the BBC want to get a balanced story and hear from Trafigura, on the one hand, and also someone from Green Peace International or a scientific expert, the threats to the BBC are being communicated back via the producers who are saying to the people from Green Peace, “But of course you can’t mention this, this, this, this and this because otherwise we might get into a defamation wrangle with Trafigura”. That seems to me just plain wrong. Let us have an open debate about it.
[...]
Paul Farrelly MP: I have read about the toxic dumping case but could you spell the name of the company?
Stephens: T-R-A-F-I-G-U-R-A.
Farrelly: Could you name the lawyers who are representing them?
Stephens: Carter-Ruck in this country; and there is a Dutch firm called Houtoff who are also representing them.

And who was the MP that posed the offending parliamentary question?

Oh, dear.