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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/international/poison_playtime_QwebQnOhMRcKmchxQufQGN
Poison Playtime
Peru lead-smelt suit could hit NY mogul
By CHUCK BENNETT
Last Updated: 7:25 AM, November 22, 2010
Billionaire industrialist Ira Rennert may have a legal problem big
enough to match his East End house, say lawyers preparing a massive
lawsuit against his mining interests.
The likely plaintiffs in the case against the Brooklyn-born Rennert --
whose 66,000-square-foot mansion in Sagaponack is the nation's largest
single residence -- would be as many as 3,000 Peruvian kids suffering
from blood poisoning allegedly caused by a lead-smelting operation he
invested heavily in, the lawyers said.
If you are going to participate in the global economy, you have to be
globally responsible. You can't treat people in Third World countries
like they are nothing, attorney Michael Hugo said by phone from Peru.
Rennert, who also owns a duplex on Fifth Avenue and is a high-society
staple of the Manhattan charity gala circuit with wife Ingeborg, will
be named personally in the suit, Hugo said.
The Brooklyn College grad-turned-self-made-billionaire also made
real-estate news in 2008, when he spent more than $60 million to buy
two Park Avenue apartments for daughters Tamara Winn and Yonina
Davidson.
Hugo, from the firm Parker, Waichman Alonso, and a team of New York
and Peruvian trial attorneys have spent months in Peru providing blood
tests to sickened children for the suit to be filed next year in
federal court in Missouri, where the company has other mining
interests.
We are looking at children with a community average lead blood level
of 32, which is off the charts by American standards, Hugo said.
I've seen children test in the 70s . . . In New York if a kid gets a
10, he's rushed to the hospital.
The numbers refer to the amount of lead per deciliter of blood, and
researchers have found just 5 micrograms can lead to intellectual
impairment.
Doe Run Peru, part of Rennert's Manhattan-based firm Renco Group,
bought La Oroya mine in 1997 for $125 million from the Peruvian
government.
Rennert is not involved with La Oroya's day-to-day operations, his
spokesman said.
When Renco first agreed to become investors in this company, the
government of Peru vowed in a written contract that it would clean up
all contamination but has utterly failed to make good, said Renco
spokesman Jim McCarthy. Doe Run Peru, meanwhile, has done everything
humanly possible to make the facility safe, which is why it makes no
sense to fault the company, let alone one of its outside investors.
He said $312 million was spent on improving standards at the mine,
which employs about 3,000 people, and another $169 million has been
budgeted.
Still, La Oroya, a town of 35,000 people about 112 miles east of Lima,
was rated one of the world's 10 most polluted places by the
environmental nonprofit Blacksmith Institute in 2006.
chuck.benn...@nypost.com
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