During an extra session of the Antwerp city council forced by the opposition, the city council defended itself in the PFOS file on Monday evening. Mayor Bart De Wever (N-VA) bit off and repeated that the Flemish Commission of Inquiry will make it clear that he has nothing to blame.
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During his intervention, De Wever pointed out that PFOS pollution around the 3M site was ‘no secret’, but on the contrary it had been widely known for many years. According to De Wever, however, there were no health risks in the infamous communication to the city council in 2017. “If the documents had stated that the health was at risk, nobody could have stopped me from communicating about it and I assume that this also applies to the other people involved,” he says. ‘But it was written in black and white that there were no consequences for the human population.’
De Wever strongly doubted that the Zwijndrecht municipal council was not informed. ‘The investigation committee will show who passed what on to whom and when’, says De Wever, who particularly advised opposition party Groen – which supplies the mayor in Zwijndrecht – to follow up closely. “I don’t like being called a liar.”
De Wever accused the opposition parties that expressed criticism of being ‘prophets of the past’. ‘You are actually saying that with today’s standards we should have intervened in the past,’ says De Wever.
The Antwerp mayor and N-VA chairman did repeat that public communication should have taken place at the time. ‘But not about health, because those insights are recent’, he says. ‘The message should have been: this is in the ground, but we are going to remove it.’
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