After a ten year-long investigation, almost three hundred thousand pages of accusation and over one point five thousand complaints, the Galice justice tribunal finally made its decision on the Prestige case about the oil spill that occurred in November 2002, caused by the shipwreck of an old oil tanker, that resulted in the loss of sixty three thousand tons of fuel, and the soiling of two point nine thousand kilometers of seashores. However, contrary to the landmark 2012 French decision on the Erika case, the Spanish decision to retain no one's liability stands out as a huge discouraging verdict of not guilty, and a tremendous waste of money and time...
The facts are quite simple. On November 13, 2002, the Prestige oil tanker reported damage and emitted an SOS. However, the captain of ship decided to delay resorting to being towed, in accordance with the practices in the field, that say towing has to be used as last resort, for being extremely expensive for the charterer (tower usually charging, in addition to the towing, a percentage over the price of the shipping).
Then, for 6 days it wandered south and north in the Spanish territorial waters, because the Spanish government at that time had refused harboring the ship in a Spanish port. This led to the biggest oil spill the country's ever known : 63,000 tons of Russian bad quality heavy fuel were spilled in the water, soiling 2,900km of seashores in Spain, Portugal, and France.
Yet this type of case is no news to the majority of lawyers used to dealing with sea pollution, especially considering the legal mess resulting from the international profile of the case. However, the damage occurred in Spanish territorial waters, resulting in the jurisdiction of Spanish tribunals, under Spanish laws, settling easily the conflicts caused by the multiplicity of foreign-origined elements of the case.
Indeed, in addition to causing soiling and destroying animal species in Spain, Portugal, and France, the Prestige was a Liberian-owned oil Tanker (Mare Shipping Inc.), under a Bahamian flag, and operating, at the time of the facts with a Greek-managed Romanian and Filipino crew, and for a Swiss charterer (Crown Resources). On the top of that, the ship was certified sailable by an American certification agency named ABS.
However, none of those were indicted despite both blaring grounds of accusation, and huge suspicions : the Liberian owner had been informed of the worrying state of corrosion of the tanks and didn't do anything. The Charterer vanished before the investigation even started, preventing any disclosure regarding the recipient's identity. Considering the certification agency, a complaint have been unsuccessfully filed in the US. That's as far as the Spanish government decided to go. And in addition to that, none of the political officials of the time, especially Mariano Rajoy, or the former minister for the equipment were indicted, for respectively minimizing the catastrophe, and making the decision to refuse harboring the ship in distress.
Only three old men were indicted: the ship captain, the chief of machines, and the former director of Spanish merchant navy. At the end, the tribunal held, very surprisingly, that there was insufficient certainty both on the causes of the damage, and on whether the Spanish authorities made or not a reckless decision in ordering the ship away into a raging sea southward and northward...
Thus none of the three indicted were declared guilty of Environmental impairment offense, and only the ship captain was sentenced to 9 months of prison, but on the grounds of unreasonably delaying towing.
On the civil matter, the general attorney had piled up the amount of damages claim up to 4.4 billion Euros, including 100 millions for France. However after 8 months of hearing, 1.5 thousand complaints, and 200 witnesses and experts, the lack of indictment, resulted solely in the condemnation of a British insurance company to pay the 22 million Euros provision it had fund in 2002. No more.
This truly contrasts with the triumphant decision that occurred in France last year on September 25, about the Erika case. Indeed even though the General Attorney had stated that the case law principle of pure ecological damage shouldn't be retained, and that the case should be dismissed due to the shipwreck occurring in international waters resulting in the absence of jurisdiction for French tribunals, the latter's Cour de Cassation, in a clever international conventions trick, confirmed French jurisdiction and the case law principle of autonomous ecological damage, and retained the charterer's responsibility towards both private and public plaintiffs, and the environment itself.
It surely isn't the same observation here with the Prestige case, as the government clearly demonstrated its inability to convict those responsible for massive environmental impairment. Instead of being groundbreaking as the French decision, the Galice justice tribunal displayed the dangerous gap in Spanish environmental law, by issuing a decision of impunity towards polluters. Spain clearly decided to avoid creating the necessary case law to bridge that gap, whereas France in on the merge of entering environmental responsibility into its Civil Code. Some efforts in addition to the 2004 Directive on environmental responsibility have to be made, otherwise, another Prestige case remains possible in Spain.