PORTLAND, Maine — Federal criminal charges brought as the result of an alleged illegal discharge discovered in February when a Cyprus ship was docked in Eastport have been dropped.
Charges against the owners of the Margit Gorthon and one of their employees were filed on May 5 in U.S. District Court.
Lemissoler Shipmanagement Ltd. of Limassol, Cyprus, and Volodymyr Nikolayev, age and address unknown, were charged with falsifying the ship’s oil logbook, removing a gauge so the alleged discharge of bilge oil waste could not be detected, and obstructing justice by ordering two shipmates to lie to authorities.
U.S. Magistrate Judge John Rich III on Monday granted the motion to dismiss the charges, which was filed last week by Todd Mikolop of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. The one-page document stated that the “government has concluded that the prosecutions are not in the interest of justice.”
Efforts to reach federal prosecutor Mikolop were unsuccessful Monday afternoon.
“Lemissoler is an excellent ship management firm, and the charges were appropriately dismissed,” defense attorney Edward MacColl of Portland said Monday. “We’re very pleased for the company. It deserves this outcome.”
MacColl also said that the captain of the ship and crewmembers, who were considered to be witnesses, were required to remain in Maine at the firm’s expense. They were allowed to return to their home countries in early June, he said.
Court documents did not indicate whether the alleged discharge happened in Maine or in international waters.
Chris Gardner, executive director of the Eastport Port Authority, said in February that there was no indication the Margit Gorthon polluted the environment in or near Eastport when it docked on Feb. 1.
The ship was detained three days later, according to previously published reports, when investigators from the U.S. Coast Guard boarded the vessel.
Pulp delivered from the Domtar mill in Baileyville was loaded onto the ship, Gardner said in February. The vessel did not unload any cargo in Eastport and was scheduled to leave Feb. 4 for Santander, Spain.
The Cyprus firm and Nikolayev were charged with violating the 1973 International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships and a 1978 protocol relating to the convention, according to court documents. The treaties established that discharges of bilge waste from machinery spaces must contain less than 15 parts per million of oil.
The U.S. is a party to both treaties.
The inspectors discovered evidence that untreated oil-contaminated waste had been discharged from the ship directly into the ocean, according to court documents. An engine crew member told Coast Guard inspectors that untreated oil-contaminated waste had been pumped from storage tanks, through the bilge piping system, through a valve and into the emergency overboard discharge system.
Once in the discharge system, the waste was sent directly overboard, according to court documents. A discharge of untreated bilge waste and dirty lubrication oil was not recorded in the oil record book. Crewmembers also allegedly showed authorities where the valve had been removed and hidden so the discharge would not be discovered and said that Nikolayev had told them to lie to authorities.
Court documents did not say how much untreated bilge water was released into the ocean.
If the case had gone forward and the firm convicted, it would have faced fines of up to $500,000 per count.