New Jersey state legislators are calling on federal and state agencies to investigate whether Argentina’s state-run oil company is using a subsidiary’s bankruptcy to avoid paying for a cleanup of the contamination in the Passaic River, NorthJersey.com reported today. The New Jersey Senate and Assembly environmental committees held an unusual joint hearing yesterday on a resolution calling for the investigations into YPF SA and its bankrupt subsidiary, Maxus Energy. The committees unanimously approved the resolution. Of particular concern to state senator Bob Smith, who heads the senate committee, was a document from 1996 that he said appears to show a scheme laid out to siphon assets away from Maxus so it could declare bankruptcy and avoid paying out possibly hundreds of millions of dollars toward cleaning up the Passaic, which is so polluted that the lower portion of the river is a Superfund site.
