The Government of Mexico, through the Secretariats of Economy (SE) and Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), reported that it disapproves of the non-unanimous ruling issued by an international tribunal administered by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which requires the country to pay compensation for denying a permit to marine mining.
For this reason, it announced that it will seek to annul the ruling before the competent courts. Through a statement, it explained that after more than two years of having completed the procedure, on September 17th the majority of the court issued the award in favor of the company. Odyssey Marine Exploration, which forces Mexico to pay compensation of 37.1 million dollars for having denied permission for a marine dredging project in Baja California Sur (BCS).
The figure represents around 1.18 % of the amount that the company originally claimed in arbitration.
He said that, between 2016 and 2018, Semarnat denied the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of the project “Dredging of black phosphatic sands in the Don Diego deposit”, so the company Odyssey initiated an international arbitration against Mexico within the framework of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The Government of Mexico detailed that “the work scheduled in the Gulf of Ulloa, in BCS, among whose partners were Diego Fernandez de Cevallos and Alonso Ancira, It consisted of marine dredging, at a distance of 12 nautical miles (22,224 m) from the closest point to the coast in an area of 61,989.2 hectares, in order to extract 7 million tons of phosphate sands annually for 50 years to produce 350 million tons of screened and dried phosphate sands for transport.
In the arbitration process, Mexico argued that the project affected an ecologically sensitive site where It is home to the loggerhead turtle, gray and blue whales, and sea lions, among others.. He also provided evidence showing the company’s lack of experience in the mining sector, as its main activity is the search for marine treasures. In addition, It was exposed that the marine dredging techniques that Odyssey wanted to implement had not been put into practice anywhere in the world.
However, the Secretariats of Economy and Environment and Natural Resources consider that the Court “gave disproportionate weight to the statements of two former executives of the General Directorate of Environmental Impact and Risk of Semarnat, presented as witnesses by Odyssey, who stated that the denial of the MIA was due to political rather than scientific reasons.
For its part, the defense of Mexico showed that both witnesses were involved in conflicts of interest by receiving large payments for testifying, which was not taken into account by the majority of the court.”
Related
2024-09-22 18:40:34