This Thursday, the Lille court sentenced the sugar giant Tereos, owner of the Béghin-Say brand, to a fine of 500,000 euros and more than 9 million in damages for having polluted the Scheldt in 2020. The Walloon region , in Belgium, will notably receive 8.86 million euros for “ecological damage”, decided the criminal court, which recognizes the “negligence” of the group in the maintenance of a dike, which had yielded and caused this pollution.
“We are obviously satisfied with the severity of the sanction”, reacted Corinne Lepage, lawyer for the region of Wallonia, who claimed 17 million euros. “I am for my part satisfied to see that the ecological damage is once again recognized and compensated,” she added. “The decision may appear severe indeed a priori”, but “on the amount” allocated to the civil parties, “it is much lower than the requests which have been made”, underlined the lawyer for Tereos, Alexandre Moustardier.
“There were negligence, recklessness”
But the obligation to “repair the environmental damage” caused, also claimed, was not retained, a prefectural decree of August 2021 already prescribing to Tereos ecological repair measures for the Scheldt.
“There was negligence, recklessness, non-compliance with the regulations” which “contributed to aggravating the risk of accident”, had pointed out the deputy prosecutor Florian Pappo, for whom “it will take years” to repair the damage.
On the night of April 9 to 10, 2020, the rupture of a dike at the Tereos plant in Escaudoeuvres (Nord), which retained beet washing water, led to the spillage of 100,000 m3 of blackish liquid, mainly organic matter, particularly in the Scheldt, which crosses France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
“The most important pollution for more than a century”
In the river, it is by tons that dead fish were recovered, the investigation concluding with the “reduction of 50% in the number of species and 90% of the numbers”. It is “the most important pollution that the Scheldt has known for more than a century”, protested Master Lepage at the time of the hearing. For the defense, master Moustardier, had pointed out “a chain of responsibilities or multiple responsibilities” of public and private actors.
According to him, the Antea Group design office responsible for controlling the basins had not underlined the urgency of an intervention. The lawyer had also put forward a “lack of administrative supervision”, before the accident, of the installations in question.