Greenpeace goes to court to shut down Mowi Chile farm
Greenpeace has launched a court bid to force the closure of Mowi Chile’s Punta Redonda salmon farm following the escape of 690,000 fish during a storm in July 2018.
Mowi was fined 5.3 billion pesos (£5.1 million) in August this year after Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment (SMA) ruled that the escape occurred because the company had not maintained appropriate security conditions or equipment of optimal quality and resistance.
Mowi believes the punishment is wrong and has said it intends to challenge the fine.
But Greenpeace claims the sanction was inadequate and wants to make the SMA impose its maximum penalty of closing the farm.
Most serious escape
In a petition to the Third Environmental Court, the environmental NGO argues that the SMA issued its fine without giving understandable reasons for not ordering closure or licence revocation.
It says the SMA has a duty under the law to impose a sanction that gives the best solution to the breach of the rules, and that in this case that means the closure of the farm.
The NGO claims that the incident “is the most serious escape of salmon that has been resolved in a sanctioning procedure to date, not only due to the quantity of escaped fish, but also due to the negligence of the owner in their rescue and due to their permanent obstacle to the function of the supervisory body”.
