Sri Lanka's New Leaders Investigate Mishandling of X-Press Pearl Disaster
The government of Sri Lanka is starting a new investigation into alleged mismanagement and corruption in response to the fire aboard the boxship X-Press Pearl, which released the world's largest-ever plastic spill just off the country's west coast. The quarter-inch pellets smothered the beaches around Colombo up to a meter deep in half-burned plastic, and buried drifts continue to wash ashore after the monsoon season. Scientists believe the marine ecosystem around Colombo will take years to recover.
From 2022-23, the government of then-President Ranil Wickremesinghe accepted a small compensation payment from the ship's P&I club, amounting to about $10 million paid in Sri Lankan rupees. The former head of the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources told Al Jazeera that she resisted the payment, warning that receiving it in rupees would make it easier for the money to be siphoned off for corrupt purposes.
Under Wickremesinghe, the government did not file a legal claim for damages for two years, and it then selected a court in Singapore (rather than Sri Lanka) as the venue for the lawsuit. Singaporean law could limit compensation to the maximum allowable under the international Convention of Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims, amounting to just $25 million - a tiny fraction of the potential $6.4 billion damage claim estimated by Sri Lanka's own consultants.
The former head of the Sri Lanka Marine Environmental Protection Authority (MEPA) has accused Wickremesinghe's attorney general of "lethargy or intentional delay" in handling the lawsuit, alleging that government lawyers slow-walked the case put together by the nation's own environmental regulator. An accumulation of "delays in legal proceedings and inadequate coordination between government agencies . . . exacerbated the environmental and economic damage,” a parliamentary inquiry concluded this September.
Wickremesinghe lost a reelection bid in September, receiving 17 percent of the vote. The newly elected president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has pledged a thorough investigation into the handling of the disaster - and to chase down allegations of corruption related to the regulatory response.