POPs IN AFRICA HAZARDOUS WASTE TRADE 1980 - 2000 ... - Arte

Background information on Taurus:
The man behind the scenes at TAURUS Umwelttechnik in
Schopfheim near the Swiss border was Ulrich Frommherz. Up
until 1990 he had run a company called FROBELIT
(“Fassadenbeschichtungen”, which means plating or building
fronts) which went bankrupt, allegedly in a fraudulent way.
Behind the front of FROBELIT, Frommherz was part of the
following toxic waste brokerage schemes in 1989 and 1990:
• a huge project to dump all kinds of toxic waste from the nonferrous
metal industries in the mountains of Transkei, South
Africa. This plan was stopped by Greenpeace and the South
African group Earthlife in 1990 (see South Africa Section of this
report).
• a scheme to dump highly toxic Aluminium waste from
Switzerland on the edge of a Norwegian fjord. This dumpsite
was closed for imports after a campaign by Greenpeace
Switzerland and Norway in 1991.
In this scheme Frommherz collaborated with the infamous
Gianfranco Ambrosini, a Swiss waste trader who had horrified
half of Africa in 1988. (Ambrosini: see also Guinea Bissau,
Senegal, and South Africa Sections of this report)
• 500,000 tonnes of “toxic waste for incineration” in non-existent
facilities in Argentina, Paraguay, Guayana, El Salvador, and
Venezuela, were to be moved out of Europe. Frommherz’s
partner here was another waste broker, H.I.S. of Lakeland,
Florida and Hamburg. H.I.S. was detected with 1,111 toxic
waste barrels bound for South America in the North German port
of Bremen, using fake import licences. H.I.S. was accused of
fraud and sentenced in numerous cases by US courts.
• FROBELIT developed a “dump project” in a desert area in the
province of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates with a UAE partner
SQUADR.
Together with his Arab friends Frommherz was dealing with
“Petrodollars”, allegedly in a fraudulent way again, as a German
public prosecutor said who had recently begun a formal court
procedure. “Many hundreds of thousands of Deutschmarks”
have been pocketed in this way by Frommherz, he says.
Possibly these Petrodollars were the starting capital for
Frommherz’s new firm, TAURUS, which obviously worked with
an international network from the beginning. The list of
addresses of the “TAURUS group” included the United Arab
Emirates (Sharjah), Cairo, Tokyo, Texas, France, Switzerland.
(as of 1992)
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