2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting to the team of journalists who had revealed the story of Trafigura and the Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump. The award went to the British journalists Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean from BBC "Newsnight" and David Leigh from "The Guardian", Synnove Bakke and Kjersti Knudsson from Norwegian TV, and Jeroen Trommelen from the Dutch paper "De Volkskrant". The citation says the award was for reports "which exposed how a powerful offshore oil trader tried to cover up the poisoning of 30,000 West Africans". The vessel (renamed "Gulf Jash") was initially heading to
2006 Ivory Coast toxic waste dump was registered only days before the arrival of the "Probo Koala", was contracted for €18,500 to dispose of the waste. The company contends that no waste was transported from Europe, and the incident was an accident caused by the mishandling by an Ivorian company of waste water used to wash the ship's storage tanks. A Dutch newspaper reported on this possibility, saying the waste could have been generated as a result of attempted on-board desulfurization (removing mercaptans) of naphtha in a Merox-like process. In this way high mercaptan-laden gasoline is upgraded to meet certain country-specific specifications. This would explain the