Russian Official: Documents on Waste Export Fake
An official has denied that Russia gave the green light to send Lebanon's waste to a Russian province, describing a document received by the authorities in Moscow as fake.
“The document that we received from the embassy of the Lebanese Republic with regards to our agreement to receive the waste is fake and forged,” the Tass Russian news agency quoted Nikolai Gudkov, press officer at the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry, as saying.
The document has “a fake and unregistered signature,” he said.
“After we discovered the forgery, we urged law enforcement agencies to pursue all participants in these illegal businesses,” Gudkov added.
The Russian official also told the agency that the export of waste is subject to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal.
“Several complicated measures” should be taken before the export of the garbage, he said. “The foreign country should deliver a memorandum to the authority that is tasked with managing the Convention and not to the Russian Environment Ministry as it has been mentioned in the fake document.”
Lebanon's trash management crisis erupted in July 2015 when the Naameh landfill that received the waste of Beirut and Mount Lebanon was closed.
The government's failure to find alternatives led to the piling up of garbage on the streets and in random locations, which raised health and environmental concerns and sparked unprecedented street protests against the entire political class.
In December, the cabinet approved the export plan with representatives of Britain’s Chinook and Holland’s Howa BV, which withdrew afterward.
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