The captain of a Portuguese-flagged cargo vessel that collided with a tanker in the North Sea in March 2025, resulting in the death of one person, was on Monday found guilty of manslaughter by a British court.
Vladimir Motine, a 59-year-old Russian national who had been on trial in London since 12th January, was convicted by a jury at the Central Criminal Court after eight hours of deliberations over the death of a member of his crew, 38-year-old Filipino seafarer Mark Angelo Pernia.
The Solong, a cargo ship flying the Portuguese flag but operated by a German company, collided in broad daylight on 10th March 2025 with the Stena Immaculate, a tanker chartered by the United States Army, which was anchored around 20 kilometres off the north-east coast of England.
According to defence counsel James Leonard, the defendant sighted the tanker when it was three nautical miles (5.5 kilometres) away and attempted to disengage the autopilot in order to manually alter course and avoid the collision. “This attempt, however, was unsuccessful and the Solong did not change course,” the lawyer said, rejecting the prosecution’s claim that Motine, who had worked on the cargo vessel since 2015, “did nothing to prevent the collision”, as alleged by prosecutor Tom Little.
However, according to the defence’s calculations, travelling at a speed of 15.5 knots, the Stena Immaculate should have appeared on the Portuguese Solong’s radar screen approximately 36 minutes before the collision.
During the trial, audio recordings from the Solong’s control room were played and a reconstruction of the ship’s trajectory towards the Stena Immaculate was presented. One hour before the collision, voices can be heard discussing the price of cigarettes. This is followed by what appears to be a phone ringing, playing a Russian folk song, which goes unanswered.
As the Solong approached the tanker, no conversation was audible in the control room, with only a cough heard less than one nautical mile before impact. After the collision, a conversation between Vladimir Motine and the UK Coastguard can be heard, in which he confirms that there is a fire.
At 9.58am, nine minutes after the collision, the captain is heard saying: “One man is still missing,” and “Come on, come on, come on, abandon ship!”
The sole fatality was Mark Pernia, a 38-year-old Filipino sailor from the Solong’s crew, whose rescue was impossible due to the flames in the area where he was located.
The captain is reported to have sent a WhatsApp message to his wife in which he said that a serious accident had occurred and that he was “to blame”.
All 23 crew members of the Stena Immaculate managed to reach land safely, as did the 13 survivors from the Solong, but it took several days to bring the fires on both vessels under control. More than 17,000 barrels of the approximately 220,000 barrels of aviation kerosene carried by the Stena Immaculate were either spilled into the sea or consumed by the flames, according to the US company Crowley, which operated the tanker.
Although a major oil spill was avoided, the collision led to the dispersal of large quantities of plastic pellets from the Solong into the sea and along the Yorkshire coastline, an area that includes several nature reserves.
Ernst Russ, the German company that operates the Portuguese cargo vessel, and Crowley, the US firm operating the tanker, have filed legal complaints against each other.
Source: DN
