T

he government is planning to take Thailand-based oil producer PTT Exploration and Production (PTTEP) Australasia to court, in support of a legal fight by a group of Indonesian fishermen who allegedly suffered from contamination caused by the company’s operations in Timor Sea.

The government plans to file a lawsuit at the Central Jakarta District Court to demand the company pay for environmental damage allegedly caused by an oil spill following an explosion at the Montara oil rig in the Timor Sea in 2009.

“We are preparing the lawsuit now. We hope it will be processed as soon as possible in Central Jakarta because we already have all the documents,” maritime security affairs deputy at the Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister, Arif Havas Oegroseno, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Arif, who leads the national team on the 2009 Montara Oil Spill Disaster in the Timor Sea Case Settlement, said the planned lawsuit was separate from the class action suit by the fishermen currently being processed in the Australian Federal Court in Sydney.

He said, however, the government had no plans to suspend the licenses or freeze the assets of PTTEP in Indonesia, as reported by the Post on Monday.

The class action was filed by more than 13,000 Indonesian seaweed farmers who are seeking more than A$200 million (US$149 million) to cover alleged damages.

Their livelihoods were devastated after the explosion at PTTEP’s Montara oil rig some 690 kilometers west of Darwin and 250 km southeast of Rote Island, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), which resulted in gas and oil from the rig gushing into the Timor Sea for more than 70 days.

It is estimated that in excess of 300,000 liters of oil per day contaminated the sea, equivalent to pouring 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools of toxic sludge daily into the ocean over the months the spill continued.

Following the oil spill, fish catches and seaweed harvests in NTT continued to decline in the heavily polluted waters. The Timor Sea Traditional Fishermen Alliance (Antralamor) said fishermen in NTT saw their incomes slump by 70 percent after the incident.

However, the class action did not represent all people affected by the oil spill, Arif said.

“Those who filed the class action suit were only seaweed farmers, while other farmers didn’t,” he said.

Therefore, the government has felt the need to file a separate lawsuit, which will be managed by the Environment and Forestry Ministry and the Attorney General’s Office.

“We can’t file a lawsuit as a representative of individuals. We can sue [the company] on the grounds of environmental damage,” Arif said.

The planned lawsuit was needed as PTTEP had not been cooperative and had “not shown good faith” in handling the incident, he added.

For instance, PTTEP refused to allocate funding as compensation from its corporate social responsibility funding, even though the company initially agreed to do so when it had discussions with a joint independent commission tasked with managing the case.

“[The allocation of the funding] had been agreed as well as the time and the place in 2012. But the company didn’t turn up. So PTTEP has not shown good faith,” Arif said.

Aside from the lawsuit, the government has also called on Australia to help find a solution to the oil spill.

Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan told Fairfax Media that after seven years there was still no resolution for those affected by the worst oil spill in the history of Australia’s offshore petroleum fields. “There is no solution so far and the victims are fishermen in the area. Australia should help out as well to solve this problem,” he said as quoted by The Sydney Morning Herald.