Total and Rina found guilty of Erika spill - Wednesday 16 January 2008

THE Total oil group lost its eight-year fight to escape being prosecuted for its role
in the Erika pollution disaster yesterday as it was condemned along with the vessel’s
classification society Rina to a maximum €375,000 fine for causing marine pollution.
The Erika’s owner Giuseppe Savarese and technical manager Antonio Pollara were also
ordered to pay maximum €75,000 fines for causing pollution but the prosecution’s call
for the imposition of a one year suspended prison sentence on them for endangering
human life was set aside. The historic judgement from the Paris court of “grande
instance”, also provided for them to pay compensation totalling an estimated €192m to
the French government, local authorities and other parties affected by the pollution
caused by the Erika’s cargo. Although all the 11 individual and four corporate
defendants had denied responsibility for the sinking of the 25-year-old tanker, Total
had been insistent from the start that, as the vessel’s charterer, there was no basis
in law for holding it responsible for the defective structural state which caused Erika
to break up and sink on December 12 1999.
Yesterday, however, judge Jean-Baptiste Parlos said that the oil company had been
guilty of “imprudence” in accepting the Erika for the transportation of the highly
pollutant heavy fuel oil number two from Dunkirk to the Italian port of Livorno.
He said that the company’s vetting service could not have been ignorant of the fact
that the vessel had been 23 years old when they had accepted it, had had eight
different names, sailed under three flags indicating that it had had a number of
different owner and been classed by four different classification societies.
He added that the fact that other oil companies had been in the habit of using older
vessels to transport their most polluting products did not detract from Total’s fault.
“If the risk-taking inherent to maritime transport is by nature admissible,” he
said, “it ceases to be so and becomes an error of imprudence when, to the perils
resulting from the conditions of navigation of a tanker, even when it has all its
certificates, other dangers are added, such as those tied to the age of the ship, the
discontinuity of its technical management and its upkeep.” The group’s lead counsel
Daniel Soulez-Lariviere said yesterday that he would be advising the oil group to
appeal against the sentence but said that the final decision lay with Total which had
10 days to take its decision. Mr Parlos discounted RINA’s claim that it should benefit
from immunity from prosecution on the basis of its role as representative of the
Erika’s flag state, Malta, and said that it too had been guilty of imprudence in
renewing the vessel’s class certification after an inspection in late November 1999 had
found suspect corrosion in its number two ballast tank. A Rina inspector had ordered
that the corrosion be inspected before the end of January but allowed it to proceed on
its final ill-fated journey. There were harsh words from Mr Parlos for Messrs. Savarese
and Pollara, who he said had deliberately reduced the scale of structural repairs
carried out on the Erika in 1998 “in a deliberate and concerted fashion for reasons of
cost”. In so doing, he said, they could not have been ignorant of the fact that they
were putting the ship in danger and exposing other people to a “risk of particular
gravity”. Mr Parlos pronounced no sentence against the Erika’s master Captain Karun
Mathur and followed the prosecution’s recommendation in finding that there was no case
to answer Total shipping manager Bertrand Thouilin .