TEPCO Shareholders Demand $67 Billion From Company Executives To Compensate Fukushima Victims
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Shareholders at Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) want executives at the utility company to pay out over 5.5 trillion ($67.4 bilion) back to the company, said a report by Reuters, on Monday, in order to use the money to compensate those affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year.
Shareholders at Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) want executives at the utility company to pay out over 5.5 trillion ($67.4 bilion) back to the company, said a report by Reuters, on Monday, in order to use the money to compensate those affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year.
On Monday, lawyers representing 42 of TEPCO’s shareholders filed a lawsuit in a Tokyo District Court, which accused 27 current and former TEPCO directors of “ignoring multiple warnings of a possible tsunami and of failing to prepare for a severe accident.”
The executives, the lawsuit claims, had also downplayed the severity of the disaster during its early stages, which in turn led to delays of the evacuation process – causing unnecessary additional damages to homes and human lives.
Consequently, the company has been saddled with huge bills, including clean-up, compensation and decommissioning costs. According to a lawyer for the shareholders, the compensation cost requested from the executives was based on calculations by a government-appointed experts’ panel on what the company was likely to pay to victims and businesses.
[quote]“By seeking to hold individuals responsible, we want to correct the collective and systemic irresponsibility in the nuclear industry,” said Hiroyuki Kawai, one of the lawyers, to a press conference in Tokyo.[/quote]Kawai though acknowledged that the likelihood that the shareholders would receive so much money from the executives was low; but most of the shareholders still wanted to go through with the lawsuit as it would at least create a precedence for directors of other utilities in the future to know that they could be held financially responsible for any similar incidents.
“Whether we can win in terms of the court decision and whether we can collect compensation are two separate issues,” said Kawai during a phone interview with Reuters.
[quote]”This could be very effective in halting reactor restarts … Directors of other utilities may have a sense of crisis that they could lose their own homes if they carelessly restart reactors and see another accident.”[/quote]Related: Japan Elite Faces Growing Credibility Gap
Related: Japan’s Tepco Seeks $9 Billion More In Aid
TEPCO is set to post record losses of close to 696 billion yen ($8.54 billion) for the financial year-end March, as the company continues to deal with the aftermath of the March 11 crisis. The Japanese government has already approved a $9 billion plan to provide additional financial support to the company, but said that it would not go ahead with the plan unless it had more say in its management.
