Ukrainian mining and steel company Metinvest Group has filed claims to the European Court of Human Rights against Russia for damages caused to its property and possessions in Mariupol and other Ukraine territories since the start of the war, it said Oct. 25.
The company’s two Mariupol-based steelworks — Azovstal and Ilyich — were destroyed in May due to the war.
Metinvest said 16 companies of the group had filed claims and more than 10 additional companies would file similar claims by the end of 2022.
The company said it was claiming that Russia had been violating its rights under Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights by causing significant damage and destruction to its assets, denying Metinvest control over its assets, effectively depriving it of ownership over the assets and depriving the company of the business use and income-generating potential over the assets.
“Therefore, each group company, which has suffered damages because of full-scale Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in February 2022, is filing a claim against Russia to hold Russia accountable for the devastations that it has caused to the group’s assets and seeks fair compensation for damages occurred due to Russian aggression,” Metinvest said.
In addition, Metinvest co-owner Rinat Akhmetov previously filed a claim with the ECHR on June 23, which the company said it was supporting, as the applications were “mutually complementary.”
Metinvest’s 49.99%-owned Zaporizhstal iron and steel works, the second-largest steel mill in Ukraine, had been running at 50% of capacity since restarting operations in early April.
Before that, it had been idled shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but restarted operations after 33 days, starting with coke and sinter plants and then running two of its four blast furnaces.
It had also restarted some of the rolling facilities, with roughly 5,000 employees involved in production processes, it said previously.
The mill produced 1.213 million mt of steel in January-September, down 58.7% year on year, with pig iron output dropping 52% to 1.566 million mt and rolled metal production decreasing 56.4% to 1.071 million mt.
Metinvest’s long rolled steel producer Kamet Steel in Kamianske had also been operating.
Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights, assessed the daily Black Sea billet price at $520/mt FOB Oct. 24, down 12.6% from the beginning of January.
— Jacqueline Holman
