Rob Horgan
THE men behind the ‘worst environmental disaster’ in Europe have been acquitted of negligence.
The decision to acquit three Greek sailors over the 2002 Prestige tanker spill has been met with widespread criticism.
The state prosecutor is now demanding the Supreme Court overturns a lower court’s decision.
Slamming the Galician court decision as ‘illogical, erroneous and outrightly wrong’, prosecutor Luis Navajas insisted the crew are criminally responsible.
He is also demanding they pay €4.3 billion for the environmental damage caused by the spill.
The crew are accused of acting negligently, resulting in 75 million litres of oil being released into the sea.
The spill took place after a storm off the coast of Galicia resulted in one of the ship’s 12 oil containers splitting.
After being denied access into French and Spanish ports – due to the spill – the ship eventually split in half and sank after six days, resulting in the ecological disaster.
The Supreme Court will now take one month to decide whether or not to prosecute Captain Apostolos Mangouras, 80, and his two lieutenants.
The wrong people were prosecuted (an 80 year old captain?) The owners, who allowed a useless hulk to carry hazardous cargoes in one of the ocean’s potentially roughest areas, should be hauled up and stripped of every euro they own and then jailed.
I agree with stefanjo completely. The owners may be from any country in the world & speak various languages but the only language they actually fully understand, is the language of money. Even if some high court should overturn the decision & the Capt & his officers get locked up for goodness knows how long, how does that seriously affect the owners? I’d add that those who sat in judgement have little idea & certainly no first hand experience of how they would have handled a ship that was in peril on the sea. Some serious help from a deep sea salvage crew may have made a difference to the outcome but again, that comes back to the owners & money!!
I was living in Galicia just up the coast when this totally unnecessary disaster happened. Had the stupid Galicians allowed this ship to anchor in one bay and then sealed this bay with booms, the damage would have been limited.
Instead the Fascist scum that ran (and still do) Galicia lined their pockets with hundreds of millions of Euros from the morons in Brussels.
Stuart’s totally right on this. The local authorities are the ones who should be prosecuted! The captain called for help. He said “We’re in deep sh#t here. We need help” and the locals responded with the dumbest actions in the history of dumb actions. Lo and behold, the sh#t hit the fan.
And where exactly did the 4.3billion go?
Its obsene how corrupt european bureaucracy is!