The Administrative Court annulled the illegal decision of the City Administration of Zrenjanin, approving the environmental impact assessment study to the Linglong company for the construction of production facilities within the tire factory, acting upon the claims submitted by the organizations RERI and Građanski preokret. After four years, the judgment confirms that Linglong constructed a significant part of the factory based on an illegitimate impact assessment procedure. As the company currently does not have a valid approval for the study, RERI has submitted a request for extraordinary inspection surveillance to the City Administration of Zrenjanin demanding to prohibit the operation of facilities within the factory complex.
Despite numerous illegalities within the impact assessment procedure, the City Administration of Zrenjanin provided approval to the Linglong for the Environmental impact assessment (“EIA”) study for the construction of “a complex of facilities for the production of tires with accompanying infrastructure” at the beginning of October 2020. With this, the company was able to start construction of facilities that included production facilities for truck and bus tires, passenger tires, tires for off-road vehicles, three warehouses for all types of tires and a hazardous waste warehouse, among other facilities.
The environmental protection measures and conditions envisaged by the study were never “incorporated” into the ten construction permits for this part of the tire factory complex. They were issued without a submitted EIA approval decision, which must be an integral part of the construction permit. In fact, some permits were issued even before the EIA approval, based on a non-binding study that was subsequently amended.
The fact that the decision was annulled due to numerous procedural and material deficiencies confirms that the measures and activities foreseen during planning and construction were never lawful. Thus, the Court found that “the EIA approval decision does not determine the conditions and measures for preventing, reducing and eliminating harmful effects on the environment”, which is the essential aim of an impact assessment and the feature that set a preventive mechanisms of environmental protection.
“The Administrative Court annulled the decision due to numerous procedural reasons, among other things indicating that the City Administration of Zrenjanin does not clarify the reasons why some of our objections were not taken into consideration. Furthermore, it is not possible to conclude in what composition and in what way the technical commission was deciding. Additionally, the Court indicates that there is no evidence that the study was adequately presented to the public, as we pointed out within the claim”, explains Hristina Vojvodić, legal advisor at RERI. “The ineffectiveness of legal remedies is proven by the fact that the judgement annulling the EIA approval was brought after Linglong obtained an usage permit for a large part of these facilities and after the ceremonial grand opening.”
The aforementioned part of the factory complex includes a 36ha10a97m2 plot, on which 389,104.3 square meters were constructed. The facilities covered by the EIA approval are only part of the project that Linglong plans to implement at the location, and the total production capacity of all plants is projected at 13.62 million tires per year. The plants are planned to work 340 days a year, 24 hours a day.
The EIA for the entire factory complex was never performed, which is why, among other things, RERI challenged all the decisions of the competent authorities issued in the EIA procedure before the Administrative Court.
“Proceedings before the Administrative Court for the Linglong factory are lasting more than 4 years, although they are related to environmental protection, bearing a high risk to the environment, but also to the citizens’ health. The Administrative Court finds that procedures related to environmental protection do not fall into the categories of “particularly urgent” or “urgent” matters. Therefore, the impression is that these cases are not of primary importance to the Administrative Court, but they will be resolved ‘when their turn” – explains Ljubica Vukčević, RERI’s lawyer.
Until a decision is issued in the repeated impact assessment procedure, Linglong shall suspend all activities, bearing in mind that the facilities cannot be used unless there is a valid EIA approval. If it is determined in the repeated impact assessment procedure that the factory cannot have these production capacities or that the project cannot be implemented at that location, does this mean that the factory will be demolished? This example has once again confirmed that in Serbia there is no responsible public administration, efficient judiciary nor capacity to carry out environmental impact assessment, especially when it comes to projects of “national importance”.
RERI hereby publishes the judgment of the Administrative Court in its entirety.
Clarifications:
Salami slicing is a well-known phenomenon in practice and theory, meaning dividing the project into parts, by which the investor tries to show the potential negative environmental impacts of the project smaller than they really are.
The decision of the Administrative Court annulled the decision that was approving the first EIA study prepared by Linglong, evidencing that the auxiliary facilities were previously constructed without an impact assessment. After obtaining approval for this study, Linglong also developed a separate study for the mixer, which artificially separated the project and incompletely presented the environmental impacts of the project. Linglong continued this practice in later stages, avoiding to assess the impacts of construction of wells and waste storage within the factory complex. A large number of these buildings were constructed by the company without construction permits and without an environmental impact assessment.
More about salami slicing and the reasons why we consider that the impact assessment procedures for the tire factory were conducted illegally are available in the publication “Implementation of the Law on Environmental Impact Assessment in the Republic of Serbia – Twenty Lost Years”.