PRESS RELEASE

Enclosed hereafter is the full text of the judgment (Spanish version).

PRESTIGE JUDGMENT

The Provincial Court of A Coruña sentences the captain to 9 months in prison for an offence of serious disobedience of authority

Acquittal for the three individuals accused of offences against the environment and damages to protected natural areas

13/11/2013. Section One of the Provincial Court of A Coruña has ruled to acquit Apostolos Ioannis Mangouras, Nikolaos Argyropoulos and José Luis López-Sors González of the offences against the environment and damages to protected natural areas of which they had been accused. The Court —made up of Juan Luis Pía Iglesias (presiding judge), Salvador Sanz Crego and María Dolores Fernández Galiño— likewise acquitted Nikolaos Argyropoulos of the offence of disobedience that he had also been charged with, expressly declaring that two thirds of the court costs would be borne by the government.

The Court did, however, convict Apostolos Ioannis Mangouras as the criminally liable perpetrator of an offence of serious disobedience of authority, contained and penalised in article 556 (relating to article 550) of the Criminal Code, sentencing him to 9 months in prison and payment of the remaining one third of the court costs, less time served.

Legal grounds for the judgment

The judgment sustains that “nobody knows exactly what might have caused this incident or what would have been the most suitable response to the emergency situation brought about by the serious damage to the Prestige.

Nevertheless, nobody can deny a structural failure, nor has it been possible to prove in the trial where exactly it occurred and why.”

According to the judgment, formal inspections were carried out and material reparations made, and the company ABS certified the ship’s seaworthiness as usual. Despite this, however, the structural failure was caused entirely by deficiencies in the ship’s maintenance and conservation monitoring, which were not the result of flaws that could be observed directly, but rather depended on complex technical analyses that were not conducted with due professionalism, efficacy and/or prudence.

According to the Judges, all of the technical reports have proven extraordinarily evasive and imprecise, as can be inferred from the literal terms used in many of these reports. Those that do seek to establish a specific and demonstrable cause are lacking in rigour and merely put the incident down to abnormal waves, the breakage/fracturing of a bulkhead or faulty conservation.

The Prestige was endorsed by all the necessary certificates and documentation required to legally navigate those waters, and the task of monitoring was entrusted to the company ABS. If the evidence shows that the structure of the Prestige was not able to withstand navigation in normal circumstances, much less in critical conditions, it is impossible for anyone to have honourably certified anything to the contrary. That is to say, rational signs emerge suggesting that the monitoring or inspection was ineffective at the very least.

The Court concludes that “if it has not been proven that the defendants wanted to sink the ship or that they were aware of its structural faults or the causes thereof, but rather simply took on a risky navigation task in terms that cannot be considered reckless, whether in a strictly professional sense or in terms of mere logic, it seems obvious to conclude that the crew of the Prestige who stand accused in this trial must be acquitted of this first offence, seeing as they did not act with malice and that their relative recklessness, should such exist, was neither efficient nor has it been proven in many respects and, above all, in no way was it serious, which is the requirement of the criminal classification for conviction.”

The other relevant charges in this trial —according to the judgment— were those presented by several parties against the Managing Director of the Merchant Navy, José Luis López-Sors González, to whom liability for the incident is attributed given that he made the decision of sending the ship away from the Galician coast, which caused the fuel from the Prestige to affect a greater expanse of the Spanish and French coastlines, with devastating financial and environmental consequences.

Given the conditions of the sea and the weather on the days in question and the state of the Prestige, as well as its proximity to the Galician coast, it was nearly imminent that the Prestige would run aground on the aforesaid coast, resulting in localised but exceedingly harmful consequences for said area and its delicate ecological balance. In this sense, as with the captain’s reaction of seeking to right the ship, most of the experts agree that the initial decision to distance it from the shore was the right one.

The judgment states that “the Spanish authorities also received proper and more than sufficient technical counsel, although, like all advice of this kind, it was not error-proof. At no point up to now has it been stated what the right decision to make would have been nor the protocol to be followed in the quite possible event that a similar incident should occur; even now, after a lengthy investigation and a long and arduous trial, nobody has been capable of stating what should have been done, aside from a few more or less technical personal opinions.” The judges believe that “quite simply, in an emergency situation, after the most rigorous and capable technical counselling, a decision was reached and, arguable though it may be, it was partially efficient, entirely logical and clearly prudent.”

The accused captain was repeatedly, imperatively and clearly ordered to have the ship towed away in order to carry out the order issued by the Spanish maritime authority, which had decided that the ship be moved away from the Galician coast. However, the accused captain did not follow nor comply with this order, but rather evasively decided not to comply with it and disobeyed it, under the pretext that he had to talk to the shipowner, taking approximately three hours to effect such consultation.

What happened was that, more concerned about the financial consequences of being towed away, which was compulsory, urgent and reasonable, than about resolving a situation of the utmost urgency, the captain decided, perhaps with some encouragement from the shipowner, not to obey the legitimate orders that he had imperatively received, thus perpetrating a clear disobedience of and intentional disregard for the principle of authority, also legitimate, of the national maritime authority. The engine driver, on the other hand, was in no position to disobey regarding the towage, because it was the captain who was responsible for deciding on that matter.

The Court upholds that “the payable civil liability cannot refer to the severe financial consequences of the oil spill from the Prestige, under articles 109, 110, 116 and concordant articles of the Criminal Code, as can be inferred from the literal meaning of these precepts, insofar as they refer to damages caused by the event or the need for said damages to arise from an offence, such that, if only the offence of disobedience is deemed verified, then the damages caused by the Prestige spillage did not arise from or were not caused by said offence, regardless of the largely verified occurrence of significant damages.”