LatinNews Daily Report - 29 August 2012

ENVIRONMENT | Two rulings in Chile and Brazil. On 28 August Chile’s supreme court ratified an earlier lower court ruling ordering the cessation of all construction work on the Central La Castilla thermoelectric energy plant and port, in the Atacama region, on environmental grounds. On 6 March last the court of appeals in Antofagasta had overturned another verdict that would have allowed La Castilla to be considered as two separate schemes for environmental assessment purposes: the 2,100 MW coal-fired thermoelectric plant and the parallel Puerto Castilla. That would have allowed for the submission of two separate Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports for the project, which environmentalists said was a cop out. “It is provided under the constitution that the owners of the projects Puerto Castilla and La Castilla thermoelectric plant must submit to an EIA that considers the two projects as one,” the supreme court stated yesterday. The US$5.0bn project, the biggest thermoelectric plant in South America, will now be subject to a new EIA before it can proceed. The project is one of Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista’s biggest investments via his MPX Energía company. MPX and its minority partner in La Castilla, the German energy company E.ON, a press release yesterday said they “regretted” the supreme court decision, adding that they would “re-evaluate [their] business strategy in Chile”. The Chilean ruling came just a day after Brazil’s supreme federal court re-authorised the works at the troubled Belo Monte Amazon dam to continue, overruling an recent stop work order delivered by a lower regional court.

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