Greenpeace is seeking a judicial review of Anadarko's offshore drilling consent:
Greenpeace today filed papers at the High Court of New Zealand in Wellington asking for a Judicial Review of the decision to allow Anadarko to carry out drilling.
The government’s Environmental Protection Agency made an ‘error in law’ by allowing Anadarko to go-ahead without looking at several key documents, including reports on oil spill modelling and emergency plans to deal with an oil spill, according to the legal papers.
Lawyers for Greenpeace are asking for the matter to be ‘allocated an urgent hearing date’ due to the ‘national importance of the issue’.
Unfortunately Anadarko has already started drilling, so presumably they'll also be applying for an interim injunction to prevent them from carrying out potentially unlawful activities until the case is resolved.
(Meanwhile, in case they simply shift to their other site off Otago, I hope someone is going over that consent with a fine-tooth comb as well to see if it suffers from similar errors).
