Government appeals against Prestige oil slick verdict
Thursday, November 21, 2013 @ 11:22 AM
SPAIN'S State law service has lodged an appeal against the verdict over the Prestige, an oil tanker which split in half off the coast of Galicia in November 2002 and caused mass pollution.
This appeal is at the instigation of the ministry of the environment, which considers the verdict too lenient and says no compensation has been awarded for the mammoth clean-up operation needed in the months that followed.
Having taken exactly 11 years to reach a decision, the court sentenced the captain to nine months behind bars but acquitted the American Shipping Bureau (ABS), which claimed the Prestige was seaworthy.
Captain Apostolos Mangouras had been ordered to move the tanker away from Spain's coast, given its high-risk cargo, but he feared the financial costs of having to tow it and decided not to heed the warning.
When the ship broke in half, the 27 crew members survived, but 77,000 tonnes of oil caused a slick polluting 1,600 kilometres of coast right across the north of Spain and Portugal as well as part of the south of France, destroying the beaches and killing off thousands of species of aquatic flora and fauna.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com