THE MALVINAS - as all South Americans call the Falklands the company that makes the poisonous 245-7 weedkiller. The company - Coalite Limited -took over in 1978 when oil was found between Argentina and the Malvinas.
Dioxin behind the killings and maimings the 'agent orange' defoliant in the Vietnam War.
which a toxic cloud poisoned a whole town.
plant killed one worker and injured 79: since then the company has blocked all attempts to investigate the incident and its after-effects.
Coalite, which made £19.7m after tax in 1981 and whose turnover has £26m to £358m since 1972, got the Falkland Islands in 1978 takeover of the Charrington, Lockett and includes Dormobile and LIC Glover, Webb and Liversidge company which armoured desert patrol vehicles.
In a 1976 advert Charrisolid fact, ye oils, *Solid fuel, oils, builders' merchanting, production, warehousilig, sheep farming, North puter services.
They took over the 'Falkland Islands Company' the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company a subsidiary of the Slater turn got the islands in 1972 Walker which as North Sea Oil began to alract senous interest and coal companies began to diversitv into oil.
Strangel enough this last tact did not tigure in Charrington's 1976 adverLocalcul which how it backs up the gallant determinatior fees and a hontribution with a 'contribution wool e y hear superb WOUL every which company pockets £400,000.
describes itself as 'the biggest employer on the island'. This is overmodest. The company is the island. It owns fifty per cent of the land outright and twent-nive per cent through interlocking dırectorships It owns all shops, all auctions and wholesaling, the banks and the shipping line that takes goods to the island and wool back where it is sold to merchants David Smiths, whom Charrington's have a fifty per cent interest.
IT Course a cocu concerned company.
discharge our responsibility,' it explains, 'not lust as regards conditions of employment but sponsoring al tivities and community efforts.
also displays due patriotic concern on the islanders' behalf. 'The company is pledged to do Britain does not let them down, ' it Get ares.
Whatever it did for the islanders must have been successful since the government retreated intention, leaked 1969, of ceding sovereignty to Argentina. are almost wholly owned by Freedom is close to Coalite's glowing heart. the main component of 245-T was caused by It caused the 1976 Seveso disaster in Italy in In 1968 an explosion in Coalite's Bolsover This patriotism may have had slightly more to •• with ine minerai oro. spects off the island than specting began in the early when Charringtons took over the islands and Shell made its first oil strike off Tierra del Fuego in 1977, a year before Coalite's takeover.
Surveys suggest that the thickest oil-bearing strata are to be found on the 'putative median line' between the Malvinas and other territory stir he Brise will islanders' patriotic spirit (and, of course, Coalite's) is duly rewarded by Mrs Thatcher.
Coalite is well-suited to inherit Charrington's treedom-loving, spirited defence the byshire plants were a continual source of complaint miners who found heavy pal over everything smoke hung "like but found the Culbally strangely unwilling to do anything about it In 1968 an explosion in its Bolsover plant killed one worker and injured 79 more, exposing 90 in all to toxic by-products of the low-temperature carbonisation process which creates Coalite at the same time as a host of dioxinrelated poisons.
Coalite continued using these products to make 245-T until the Seveso incident but has tended keep its reasons to itself Indeed chairperson Needham' unexpected audience since 1976 when the company stopped talking to the press.
In 1977-78 Coalite was forced by pressure from the Health and Safety Executive to authorise follow-up study of workers exposed to the explosion's effects. It then refused to publish the results, blocking a turther study by in the Health and Safety regulations despite appeals from the Health and Safetv executive the and Derbyshire County Council.
Desert Patrol vehicle made by Coalite subsidiary Glover, Webb and Liversidge Ms Jenny Martin, the clinician who carried out the study, finally published some of the results in medical journal Lancet. Her house was subsequently burgled and records of eight subjects of the study were removed.
There is no duplicate copy and the work is now lost. Macclesfield police say the case remains on their books as unsolved.
Perhaps they are too busy with the growing threat of street crime to investigate the rather obvious possibility for a connection between this and a mugging whose scope far exceeds anything that takes place on streets: the mugging of peoples the South Atlantic by the oil companies and Margaret Thatcher, hysterically egged on the Labour benches. THE ARGENTINE Independence pounded three US ships
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....I STILL THINK IT WAS A LITTLE RASH, JOHN.