German shipping company pleads guilty, to pay $1 million for pollution of Great Lakes waters
Owners of Cornelia required to pay $1 million criminal sanction; $200,000 earmarked for protection of Lake Superior and Lake Superior Watershed. United States Attorney Andrew M. Luger on July 5 2016 announced the guilty plea of MST MINERALIEN SCHIFFAHRT SPEDITION UND TRANSPORT GMBH (“MST”), a German company and operator of the M/V Cornelia, with violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) by failing to maintain an accurate ship record about the disposal of oil-contaminated waste. MST pleaded guilty today before U.S. District Judge Joan N. Ericksen in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, Minn., the U.S. Department of Justice said on its website.
According to the defendant’s guilty plea and documents filed in court, from February 2015 through October 2015, the M/V Cornelia, a German-owned commercial vessel, experienced significant leakages of oily waste-water. As a result, the M/V Cornelia was accumulating a substantial volume of machinery space bilge water.
On at least ten occasions, the M/V Cornelia’s Chief Engineer and/or Second Engineer instructed members of the engine room crew to transfer machinery space bilge water from the dirty bilge tank to the clean bilge tank, which is a separate tank that is supposed to contain only clean, oil-free water, and then discharge the oily waste-water overboard. At least one occasion when machinery space bilge water was transferred to the clean bilge tank and then discharged overboard occurred in approximately May 2015 while the ship was in the Great Lakes.
On each occasion in which oily waste-water was transferred internally and then discharged overboard, the Chief Engineer intentionally failed to record the transfers and subsequent discharges of oily waste-water in the M/V Cornelia’s Oil Record Book (ORB). This gave the false impression in the ORB that all of the oily waste-water had been properly handled and disposed.
On November 3, 2015, the M/V Cornelia called upon the Port of Duluth to load grain for transport to Africa. At that time, U.S. Coast Guard inspectors boarded the vessel to conduct a Port State Control examination and were presented with the M/V Cornelia’s ORB containing the omissions and false entries.
As a condition of the defendant’s guilty plea, MST will be required to pay an $800,000 criminal fine to the United States. In addition to the criminal fine, MST will be required to make a community service payment of $200,000 to support the protection and preservation of Lake Superior and the Lake Superior watershed.
As an additional condition of the defendant’s guilty plea, MST will serve three years of probation, during which time the organization must commit no further violations of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL), federal, state or local law. In addition, MST must fund and implement an Environmental Compliance Plan (ECP) for all vessels that it operates which call at ports or places in the United States.
This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Benjamin F. Langner and John Kokkinen.