MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

South Georgia scrap merchant seeks justice and compensation for his lost assets.

Twenty years after being the main character in series of events which eventually escalated into the South Atlantic War, Constantino Davidoff, the man behind the landings by a group of Argentine scrap merchants on South Georgia continues to claim his innocence and says he still hopes to recover his assets lost on South Georgia as a result of the conflict in a British Court of Justice.

Davidoff told MercoPress that all the evidence which has come to light over the last two decades proves that he was not part of any Argentine government plans to resolve the Falklands Islands conflict by force.

In reviewing the events of twenty years back Davidoff says that in 1979 he signed a contract with a Scottish company, Christian Salvesen of Edinburgh authorising him to clear away scrap metal from the abandoned whaling factories on South Georgia. All along a prolonged series of negotiations Davidoff claims he kept the British Embassy in Buenos Aires aware of every step he was taking and got their prior approval to travel to both South Georgia and the Falkland Islands.

Davidoff explains that it is important to put the Salvesen contract into its true context for it to make any sense.

Since 1976 both the Argentine and British governments had carried out different actions which would have a direct bearing on the subsequent events on South Georgia.On the one hand Britain had announced that the South Georgia survey base was to close and that the ice protection vessel HMS Endurance was to be decommissioned.

Additionally, the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands had been denied full British citizen.All this led the Argentine military junta which had taken office in 1976 ? in particular the Navy - to conclude that Britain was pulling out of the South Atlantic area and that Argentina's ambitions in the area were on the road of being resolved in its favour.

By the late 1970's the military junta was facing increasing international isolation as a result of its appalling human rights record and was seeking ways of whitewashing its tarnished reputation. One of the courses of action open was to try to resolve the outstanding international border disputes with Chile or the outstanding sovereignty disputes with Britain in the South Atlantic.

In 1979 the border dispute with Chile had almost led to an armed conflict. It was only as a result of a timely intervention by the Pope John Paul II that the two countries did not go to war.

In the South Atlantic area the Argentine Navy has set up a base on the South Sandwich island of South Thule, an incident which had gone unchallenged by London and which had spur