Reno, Nev. – A judge has dismissed a whistleblower lawsuit against Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. by two former workers because they failed to follow company procedures for filing complaints about environmental violations.
Environmental specialists Sandra Ainsworth and Rebecca Sawyer claimed they were fired in 2002 in retaliation for making repeated complaints about pollution and permit violations at Newmont’s Lone Tree gold mine in northern Nevada.
Their lawyer said the judge’s ruling includes an “outright misstatement of facts” and they likely will appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court.
“We’re definitely considering it and probably will,” Henry Egghart said today.
Humboldt County District Court Judge Kyle Swanson ruled from the bench late last month and said in a written ruling this week that Ainsworth and Sawyer failed to show they lost their jobs for anything other than “legitimate business reasons.”
They “knew that there was a possibility that they would be laid off when they were hired,” Swanson said.
“There is no record of evidence in this case to demonstrate that plaintiffs were the victims of any atrocious or utterly intolerable conduct on the part of a Newmont representative,” he said.
Denver-based Newmont, the world’s largest gold mining company, is “pleased that the judge recognized there was no merit to the plaintiffs’ claims,” spokesman Doug Hock said.
Besides ignoring company policy, the judge said the two women failed to report environmental violations to any government agencies while they worked for Newmont. Ainsworth, who since has moved to Arizona, was hired in 1997, and Sawyer of Battle Mountain was hired in 1999.
After their dismissal in April 2002, the women took their concerns to state environmental regulators, who launched an investigation into their claims but took no action against Newmont.
The women complained about arsenic releases from a cooling pond, lack of sediment controls as required by federal law, the chemical makeup of a pit lake, problems with air pollution monitoring and failure to clean up acidic drainage from tailings around the mine, which is near Winnemucca, about 165 miles northeast of Reno.
The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection said Newmont officials interfered with the state probe by refusing to make employees available for questioning.
Investigators were unable to substantiate the bulk of the complaints but warned that the integrity of the findings might have been undermined by Newmont.
“The investigation was delayed by two months and …
consequently lost the element of surprise, which is often times critical in an investigation,” an April 2003 state investigative report said.
The whistleblower lawsuit filed in Nevada’s Sixth Judicial District in June 2003 accused Newmont of forcing the women “to engage in, acquiesce to and not report illegal conduct and to violate codes of conduct and ethical standards of their profession as well as defendant’s own publicly stated environmental policy.” The suit seeking unspecified damages said Newmont told the women their positions were being eliminated as part of a reorganization, but that additional workers were hired soon after.
Egghart said the judge appeared to cite part of Newmont’s internal policy that asks employees with complaints to contact a company hot line. But Newmont rules also allow for complaints to be taken to supervisors, he said.
“There are numerous instances of them complaining internally about the lack of compliance and violations,” he said. “It’s an outright misstatement of facts.” In one case, a state regulator visited the mine to investigate an “informal complaint” that one of the women made while employed there, Egghart said.
“The violation was serious enough that the regulator … threatened to shut down construction. The judge found that was not enough” to constitute a formal complaint, Egghart said. “I don’t agree with his decision.”
