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Indonesian government poised to sue over Montara oil spill
Sydney Morning Herald - October 14, 2015
Fishermen and seaweed farmers in Nusa Tenggara Timur – one of Indonesia's poorest provinces – say their fish stocks and seaweed crops were devastated after the 2009 Montara oil spill in Australian waters in the Timor Sea.
However PTTEP Australasia, a subsidiary of Thai state-owned oil company PTTEP, has repeatedly said it has not received any credible evidence that oil from Montara caused damage to the environment in West Timor.
Fairfax Media was told the Indonesian government summoned Australia's Ambassador Paul Grigson on September 23 and asked the Australian government to put pressure on PTTEP to pay compensation.
"I said we will wait for the Australian (government) and if they don't return with tangible action we will sue (PTTEPAA). The problem has been going on for years," the senior government official told Fairfax Media. He said the case would be heard in the Central Jakarta District Court.
"PTTEPAA has never shown any goodwill with their behaviour."
Greg Phelps, the Australian Lawyers Alliance national president, is this week also taking detailed statements from affected villagers on Rote island in West Timor with a view to taking separate legal action in Australia. "We are contemplating a class action, that's for sure," Mr Phelps said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the Australian government had been active in encouraging the parties to re-establish discussions to resolve any outstanding issues.
"But at the same time, we (the Australian Government) have no jurisdiction to compel an Australian company to settle a dispute with another government," she said.
"The Australian government remains willing to assist and is in contact with the Government of Indonesia on this issue."
However West Timor Care Foundation president Ferdi Tanoni said that under international law a country is meant to ensure that damage from activities in its own state does not impinge on the sovereignty of another. "This has never been the case in the Montara Oil spill," he said.
For more than 10 weeks in 2009 oil and gas flowed unabated into the Timor Sea, about 250 kilometres off the northwest coast of Australia. Estimates of the surface coverage of the hydrocarbons range from 6000 to 25,000 square kilometres.
The 2010 Montara Commission of Inquiry, which had nearly all the powers of a Royal Commission, found "the way that PTTEPAA operated the Montara Oilfield did not come within a 'bulls roar' of sensible oilfield practice".
Commissioner David Borthwick said it was unlikely the full environmental consequences of the blowout would ever be known.
"The evidence before the Inquiry indicated that hydrocarbons did enter Indonesian and Timor Leste waters to a significant degree," the report said.
The West Timor Care Foundation has repeatedly asked the Australian government to fund an environmental assessment of the impact of the Montara oil spill on the Nusa Tenggara Timur community.
"We ask for very little and certainly nothing more than the Australian government should have done many years before now," the foundation's president, Mr Tanoni, said in a letter to the office of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
"The spill commenced in Australian waters under the regulation of the Commonwealth and Australia has not taken a single step to investigate the impact in waters of NTT. Your government chooses to turn a blind eye."
PTTEPAA refused to comment.
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