Bummer - The ICI factory that used to operate on the River Wyre had an 'accidental' discharge of some cack a few years ago and it stripped a few boats clean at Knott End.
Corporate manslaughter can be pinned on the chief executive. This is environmental slaughter but I take your point. When I was purchasing land and disposing of land for the Environment Agency our process demanded that all hazards were remediated in advance. Although the EA get a bad press, their problems can be traced to lack of funding and political interference.The difficulty is pinning it on (i) the top executives in a personal capacity and (ii) on a company where no positive duty exists. Here a positive duty existed and so it is possible to convict the company, though they did go through a trial.
The person who comes well out of this is the potential buyer (property developer) whose initial testing showed the (significant) presence of TBT in the quayside tanks and then kicked off when that was no longer present on the second time of testing and realised International had just flushed it out into the Yealm (and indeed it was all found around the quayside area)
Thats inflation for you - it used to be £12 ?Knott End. There is a blast from the past. Reminds me of the old newspaper headline gag:
"Knott End - Flattened to the Ground in Earthquake - £1000 worth of damage"