Last week, Taiwan’s Tung Kuang Industrial Joint Stock Company was found by the Ministry of Public Security’s Environmental Police (C36) to have been discharging untreated toxic waste into Cam Giang district’s Gie River for years.

It is the latest high-profile environmental violation by a foreign direct investment firm after Taiwan’s Vedan Vietnam and South Korea’s Miwon Vietnam, two big monosodium glutamate producers, in 2008 were found discharging untreated toxic wastewater into Dong Nai province’s Thi Vai River and the north’s Red River, respectively.

Two months ago, the Dalat-Japan Food Company Limited in Lam Dong province was also caught poisoning the environment, which had gone on for a decade.

All those firms had been required to compensate for their damages to the environment and local residents and revamp their waste treatment systems, even temporarily shut down.

“Tung Kuang’s violation is even more dangerous than the previous cases, because it relates to metal and chemical waste that are more toxic than foodstuff-related wastewater,” said Nguyen The Chinh, vice head of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment’s (MoNRE) Institute of Strategy and Policy on Resources and Environment.

According to C36, the Hanoi Stock change-listed Tung Kuang’s discharged water contained lots of toxic chemicals and metal substances with a concentration 10-times higher than permissible limits. Tung Kuang will face further inspections by C36 and other local authorised agencies.

Hai Duong’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment said that before the C36 investigation, Tung Kuang’s violations had already been detected and the provincial authority had asked the MoNRE to force the company to shut down.

“However, though Hai Duong’s authorised agencies has blacklisted the company as having seriously damaged the environment, punishing it and telling it many times to stop discharging wastewater into the river, Tung Kuang took no action until it was caught in the act,” said the department’s head Vu Dinh Hien.

Chinh said violators like Tung Kuang should have their operations stopped permanently. Tung Kuang’s executives once said that its wastewater treatment system, installed in 2002, was the most modern in northern Vietnam.

However, at the time of inspection, C36 found that the system was not operating properly and a complicated underground wastewater system, hundreds of metres long, running from the factory to the river, was found. Tung Kuang’s deputy general director Liu Chien Lin said he did know about the company’s violations and blamed the mistake on his subordinates.

Specialising in producing aluminum products, Tung Kuang established its first 25,000 hectare factory in 1995 in Dong Nai province’s Bien Hoa 2 Industrial Park and its second factory in late 2003 in Hai Duong.

In 2009, Vietnamese environmental police detected 4,545 environmental violations, four times more than in 2008.