Global Action on ArcelorMittal media release

For immediate release: December 2, 2008

ArcelorMittal slammed for financial crisis ‘blackmail’

Environmental and community groups from the Global Action on
ArcelorMittal coalition (1) have today slated as “blackmail” steel giant
ArcelorMittal’s use of the financial crisis as an excuse to demand
subsidies and delays in environmental measures in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The governments of both Kazakhstan and Ukraine have signed memoranda of
understanding with ArcelorMittal to prevent thousands of workers from
being dismissed, granting exemptions from environmental obligations, as
well as providing tax breaks and state subsidies such as lower prices
for electricity, water, gas, coal and railway rates, and guaranteed
state purchase of steel.

“After a series of accidents in ArcelorMittal’s Kazakh mines in the last
five years that have left nearly 100 miners dead, earlier this year the
Kazakh authorities were threatening to revoke the company’s operation
licence. Yet now the company has them over a barrel and they are ready
to agree to anything,” according to Dana Sadykova of Karaganda
Eco-Museum, Kazakhstan.

In letters sent today to the Kazakh and Ukrainian Presidents and
Government the coalition has called on the respective governments to
re-think their decisions and not to let the company wriggle out of its
environmental obligations.

“Obliging the state to solve the energy efficiency problems of the plant
by insisting on subsidized rates for energy and asking for delays of
modernization and energy efficiency improvements is shameful”, said
Alena Miskun of the National Ecological Centre of Ukraine. “It is
regrettable that the Ukrainian and Kazakh authorities have capitulated -
these agreements must be reviewed immediately”.