The 623-foot ship was built in China in 2010. Owned by Aquarosa Shipping, a Danish company, it is registered in Malta and run by a Greek company.
Efploia Shipping Co., the operator of the vessel, and Aquarosa Shipping, the owner, were each fined $925,000. In addition, the defendants were each ordered to perform community service by writing checks for $275,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation for non-profit projects aimed at restoring the Chesapeake Bay and other Maryland waterways.
The two companies have agreed to prepare an environmental compliance plan that will be reviewed and audited by a court-appointed monitor.
The whistle-blower, a seaman who supports a wife and four children on $27,000 a year, stands to earn a six-figure reward for his efforts, including gathering copies of the ship’s logs and snapping hundreds of pictures of illegal onboard activities with his cell phone. A decision on the size of his reward is pending; federal law says the amount can be as much as half the fine.
The case is the latest in a series of high-profile pollution enforcement efforts sparked by whistle-blowers and carried out by Baltimore’s Coast Guard investigators and the Justice Department.
Greek nationals hired by Efploia made up the senior staff, and the crewmen were Filipinos hired by an agency in the Philippines. In its short life, the ship has delivered Chinese steel to Brazil, Brazilian sugar to Indonesia and Indonesian agricultural products to Europe.
The Aquarosa arrived in the US from Europe on February 19 2011, its first visit to Baltimore. Members of the Coast Guard’s inspection team boarded the ship because it was operating with provisional safety and environmental certificates. As they spoke to the engineering staff, a tall, soft-spoken man handed them a note, court documents said.
Within days, Lopez turned over to Coast Guard investigators copies of the ship’s logs over the eight-month voyage and a cell phone containing more than 300 photos of illegal onboard activities, court documents show.
Investigators found that the ship’s senior engineers had devised a "magic pipe" that allowed them to bypass pollution-control devices and discharge waste oil and bilge sludge into the ocean undetected, court records showed. The records also showed that engineers then falsified logs to hide the fact and that top engineers ordered crewmen to dump oily garbage overboard.
