Argentina’s YPF S.A. yesterday told a bankruptcy judge that it shouldn’t be forced to pay to clean up the Passaic River, a New Jersey waterway contaminated by decades of industrial use, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. With billions of dollars in potential environmental cleanup costs on the line, YPF’s lawyers denied manipulating a now-defunct U.S. unit to escape liability for one of the largest Superfund sites in the nation. A 17-mile stretch of the Passaic river, upstream and down from Newark, NJ, is so contaminated that crabs and fish aren’t safe to eat. Who will pay to fix the Passaic is the central question of a lawsuit growing out of the bankruptcy of YPF’s Maxus Energy Corp. The case is considered a test of the force that U.S. environmental laws have once bankruptcy laws are in play. YPF, which is solvent and majority-owned by Argentina, owned Maxus, an oil-and-gas company that decades ago manufactured Agent Orange, the herbicide that became notorious for its use in the Vietnam War.
