MAKAROV (Russia): Sirens scream, jeeps fly past, helicopters prepare for take-off. Russia’s flamboyant environmental enforcer Oleg Mitvol is in town.

Mitvol’s mission this time may be his biggest yet: to halt a 20-billion-dollar energy project led by British oil giant Shell on Russia’s eastern edge.

“Sakhalin Energy is treating us like a banana republic,” Mitvol said on a helicopter tour to a section of oil and gas pipelines that run like a scar down 800 kilometres of the energy-rich island of Sakhalin.

Russian officials and campaigners say the pipelines break a series of laws by causing erosion, silting up pristine rivers and running illegal access roads through dense forest.

“About 20 per cent of the pipeline project is in violation of the law... Twelve rivers have been completely destroyed,” said Igor Chestin, Director of the Russia Programme for WWF, an international environmental watchdog.

Russian officials are now moving to revoke environmental authorisation granted in 2003 for Sakhalin Energy — one of the biggest privately-funded energy projects in the world.

Executives from Sakhalin Energy, in which Shell holds 55 per cent and Japanese firms Matsui and Mitsubishi own the rest, say this would cause massive financial losses and dent Russia’s reputation as an energy supplier.

“Although the project has faced significant environmental challenges, the company firmly believes that these have been fully addressed,” Sakhalin Energy said in a statement.

Energy analysts believe the environmental violations are a pretext being used by the Russian government to pressure Sakhalin Energy to sell a large stake to state gas monopoly Gazprom.

But that prospect does not bother local campaigners, who have complained for years that energy projects on Sakhalin threaten the reindeer population, salmon stocks and the endangered Western Pacific grey whale.

“It’s pleasing that the government is finally taking concrete steps. It doesn’t matter if there’s a political subtext,” said Andrei Kurbatov from Sakhalin Environment Watch.

The pipelines are to connect the vast Sakhalin-2 oil and gas fields being developed by Sakhalin Energy off the northeast corner of this often mist-shrouded island to the southern tip for shipping overseas.

Several countries have criticised the Russian government on this issue, particularly nearby Japan, where utilities have already bought up future deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) set to start in 2008.

Mitvol, a media-savvy official who is deputy head of the Russian environmental agency Rosprirodnadzor said: “The company is very powerful... They’ve been using political levers both inside and outside Russia.”

One executive from the Sakhalin Energy project who has worked in Sakhalin oil and gas for several years said that violations were improbable but that the threat of oil spills was high.

“These companies are working to high environmental standards,” said the executive, who declined to be named since he did not have authorisation to speak to a reporter.—AFP