Danish dredger arrested by ITF Denmark

Baltic Dredging ApS, a Danish-registered company with Swedish owners, has trouble with ITF Denmark over ten Indian seafarers signed on the Panama-flagged dredger Lesse. The crew has been shuffled around to the Danish flagged dredger Kristina Høj and the Lithuanian-flagged tug Lisa (ex Pors) and on top of this, the crewmen have been used as construction workers on the owner’s estate in Skåne. All was done for very low wages according to the ITF and the Danish union 3F. The unions have arrested the dredger Lesse to obtain unpaid wages of DKK 300,000, which Baltic Dredging so far has refused to pay. Furthermore the Danish Maritime Authorities has conducted a Port State Control on the Lesse, which now is detained at Odense where all three vessels have been laid up for some time. The Lesse was built in Kinderdijk in 1956 and is on 1,945 DWT.