Shipping Co. Pleads Guilty in Pollution Case, Will Pay $10M

Feb. 3, 2006 – At a sentencing hearing in Boston yesterday, a small Hong Kong-based shipping company pleaded guilty to purposely dumping pollutants in waters along the Atlantic seaboard and was ordered to pay a $10 million fine, the US Department of Justice announced. The penalty is the largest environmental fine in Massachusetts history and is accompanied by a $500,000 levy to be directed to community projects undertaken by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in the region.

Sign up to receive NewStandard headlines and extras by e-mail weekday mornings!

Your privacy is strictly respected.

According to the Justice Department, a ship operated by MSC Ship Management Limited used an illegal pipe to dump more than 40 tons of oil-soaked waste and oil sludge from the ship into waters at various US ports and across the Atlantic Ocean. The Coast Guard first uncovered the ship’s dumping scheme during a routine inspection last May, the Justice Department said.

In court last December, MSC admitted to the illegal dumping and to attempting to hide information from investigators. Reportedly, company officials told crew members to lie about the “magic pipe,” as they called it, and to destroy documents related to the practice, though a company spokesperson told the Boston Globe that the crew acted against MSC policy and may have used the pipe as a makeshift solution to a problem with the ship.

The Justice Department maintains that MSC engaged in purposeful pollution. In yesterday’s statement, assistant Attorney General Sue Ellen Wooldridge said: “Deliberate pollution from vessels is a serious and recurrent problem that threatens the state of our oceans. The sentence imposed today is significant because it sends the message that we will seek increasingly tougher penalties for those in the maritime industry who continue to pollute.”

Promotional Tools

Share this article with the world using these popular services!

Though Wooldridge offered no statistics or data to back the assertion, European Space Agency ocean-imaging shows that deliberate dumping by oil tankers is the single largest cause of oil-polluted oceans.