The London Olympic Committee stands firm, says Dow will remain a sponsor for the Olympic Games. The London Olympics Organisisng Committee said on Friday that Dow Chemicals will remain the sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics.
The chief executive of the London Olympics said that the clean up of the Bhopal disaster site is the Indian government’s responsibility.
“Absolutely comfortable with Dow’s position as sponsor of the Olympic Games. I think the counter-position if you look at it carefully, there was a total settlement of those liabilities and I think the real question that needs to be asked is, you know, what happened to the money that Dow paid? And, you know, what is happening in India in terms of the responsibility to clear up that site?”,” London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton said.
In India, Bhopal gas tragedy activist Satinath Sarangi responded to the development by saying, “It shows how shameless the Olympics Organising Committee can be.”
Earlier, the Vice-President of the Indian Olympic association, Tarlochan Singh, welcomed the resignation of a London 2012 Olympics Commissioner Meredith Alexander, as she quit her role in protest at Dow Chemical’s sponsorship of the Olympic stadium wrap.
Singh says that the Senior Vice President of Indian Olympic Association Vijay Kumar Malhotra has written to the International Olympic Committee asking it to remove Dow as one of the sponsors.
Meredith Alexander, who is one of 12 commissioners of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 watchdog, resigned from her post, citing concerns about Dow’s relationship with the company responsible for the 1984 gas disaster.
After Alexander’s resignation, senior Labour party figures such as Keith Vaz and Tessa Jowell (shadow Olympics minister) have also called for an audit of the process by which Dow Chemical was awarded the sponsorship.
However, London 2012 chief executive, Paul Deighton, insisted that after Alexander’s resignation, it would not reconsider the decision to award the contract to Dow, which also has a 100 million pounds deal with the International Olympic Committee.
He said: “It is absolutely her right to make her point about how she feels about the victims of Bhopal. We fully respect her. She is one of 12 people who signed off on our process for choosing Dow to provide the wrap, so we carryon.”
He added: “It is absolutely her right to resign. She is one of 12 members of that sustainability commission who signed off on the way we approached awarding the wrap to Dow. I think that it is great that we have got this independent function to oversee so all this is washed through transparently. I think that is fine but we are moving on.”
The London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) has consistently defended the process by which Dow was awarded the sponsorship contract.
Keith Vaz said: “Meredith Alexander’s resignation was brave and principled. It is completely unacceptable that a supposedly sustainable Olympic Games is taking sponsorship from a company with as appalling a human rights and environmental record as Dow’s”.
He added: “I hope LOCOG and the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 will now see that it is untenable for Dow’s sponsorship to continue. The fact Ms Alexander felt it necessary to resign has brought the Commission’s credibility into question. It will remain so as long as Dow remains a sponsor of London 2012.”
Jowell said: “I have called today for an audit of the steps taken that led the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 to recommend to LOCOG that Dow Chemicals’ sponsorship of the wrap was consistent with the high sustainability aims that we set for 2012″.
She added: “We also need to understand what the role of other Commissioners was in the process which reached that conclusion. We need a solution not a row. Dow Chemicals need to understand the seriousness with which people take the continuing situation in Bhopal following the tragic disaster in 1984. I will do everything I can to make sure this issue does not overshadow the Games. There is still time for a solution to be found.”
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